Zcash Sheds 16% in a Week as $17.8M of Longs Are Flushed

Zcash's leveraged longs paid for the drop. CoinGlass data shows $17.76 million of ZEC futures positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, and the split says who got hit: $14.86 million of that was long positions, against $2.90 million short.

The exact size of the fall depends on when you measure it. Two outlets tracking the move on Thursday put the 24-hour decline at about 13%. The CoinGlass snapshot in this piece, read later as the day went on, shows ZEC at $1,107.93, down 5.07% over 24 hours, with a market capitalization of $18.68 billion and 16,917,822 ZEC in circulation. The seven-day number is uglier: ZEC is down 16.45% over that window.

The rest of the market was weak, but not by this much. In the same snapshot:

• Bitcoin: $81,180, down 0.89%
• Ether: $2,370.04, down 2.32%
• Solana: $103.1, down 0.95%
• XRP: $1.3103, down 1.86%
• Hyperliquid: $80.001, up 0.53%

Longs Took Nearly All of the $17.8 Million Flush

Zcash's own futures book did most of the damage. Of the $17.76 million in ZEC positions closed out over 24 hours, about 84% came from long positions, which means the traders betting on higher prices were the ones removed from the market.

Zcash was not alone in that. Crypto-wide liquidations reached $913.82 million over the same period, up 222.49%, with total open interest across the market at $140.51 billion.

Bitcoin and ether futures accounted for around $483 million of forced close-outs, about $286 million in ether contracts and around $197 million in bitcoin. Solana futures added roughly $31 million, and Zcash just under $19 million.

ZEC Futures Turn Over 13 Times Its Spot Volume

The leverage that built up on the way to Zcash's highs is visible in the venue data. Over the same 24 hours Zcash's spot market did $572.27 million of volume while its futures market did $7.38 billion, roughly thirteen times as much.

Open interest, the value of Zcash derivative contracts still open and not yet settled, stood at $2.25 billion. Hyperliquid's ZEC/USD market carried $549.08 million of that, the largest of the venues CoinGlass lists, and $3.50 million of its long positions were liquidated during the day.

Account-level positioning was close to even. CoinGlass's long/short ratio for Binance ZEC/USDT accounts read 0.9238, a slight lean toward accounts holding shorts, while OKX ZEC accounts read 1.08, a slight lean toward longs.

The Drawdown Inside a 347% Year

The loss looks smaller next to what came before it.

The shape is familiar from other tokens that ran hard and gave some back: Starknet's STRK fell double digits from a 214% rally as a 127 million token unlock approached.

No Confirmed Trigger Behind the Drop

This desk found no Zcash project statement or protocol incident behind the move, and no Zcash-specific regulatory action appeared in the material reviewed.

There is also an unverified thread running through the Zcash story this month: whether concern that AI could break the encryption behind crypto wallets has anything to do with how privacy coins trade. That case has been argued, but nobody has published a flow that measures it. It belongs in the unresolved pile, not the cause column.

What is measurable is the leverage. CoinGlass's own note on the $2.25 billion open interest figure reads:

This indicates that market leverage is still adjusting.

Open interest at that level is still about four times Zcash's daily spot turnover. The mechanism that amplified this drop has not finished working.