Zcash printed $1,500 today

$ZEC hit an intraday high of $1,503.98 on Thursday, up 15% on the day and 194% over the past month, with a market cap of $25.26 billion and 24-hour trading volume of $2.86 billion. A year ago, the token traded near $51.

NU7 Vote Delivers a Clear Mandate

The rally follows the close of the NU7 coinholder vote on Monday. Coinholders backed cutting the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds by nearly unanimous margins, with 98.9% supporting the preservation of Bitcoin-style halving emissions. Around 2.4 million ZEC of roughly 3.6 million eligible tokens participated.

The vote was conducted through a privacy-preserving system that counted only Ironwood shielded balances and encrypted ballots, allowing validators to verify the result without revealing individual holder balances. Eligibility required ZEC to be spendable, shielded, and held in Ironwood at the snapshot.

The upgrade preserves Bitcoin-style halving, reduces block time to 25 seconds, and phases out the legacy Sprout pool. An activation height for NU7 remains unset, meaning the vote represents a scope mandate rather than an immediate hard-fork date.

Ledger Deal and Grayscale ETF Add Fuel

@Zcash Labs has established a new funding agreement with @Ledger to support the integration of Zcash's Ironwood (NU6.3) shielded pool, committing $80,000 to fund engineering work required to adapt prior Orchard integration to the new Ironwood architecture. The integration will undergo an independent security audit followed by final QA testing, with a target release at the end of September 2026.

Approximately 3.95 million ZEC is already stored in Ironwood, while shielded transactions now account for nearly 50% of daily network activity. Broader hardware wallet access could deepen that trend, though only a few Ledger devices currently support the new pool, and exchange support remains uneven, with Gemini supporting Ironwood withdrawals while many other platforms have yet to upgrade.

The move also coincided with the conversion of Grayscale's long-standing Zcash Trust into a spot exchange-traded product that began trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH. @Grayscale's spot ZEC ETF holds $729 million, around 3% of $ZEC's current market cap. Market participants believe the ETF has provided a new channel for institutional capital, driving increased attention to the privacy coin sector.

Some researchers have also linked the broader surge in privacy coins to AI tools reducing the cost of identifying on-chain addresses. As it becomes easier to track address behavior and asset movements, demand for on-chain financial privacy is rising.

Sources
Decrypt: Zcash Closes On $1,400 After Coinholders Vote to Keep Bitcoin-Style Halvings
Crypto Times: What Catalysts Are Really Driving ZEC Price?
AMBCrypto: Zcash Boosts Privacy With $80K Ledger Push