The debate between the Bitcoin (BTC) and Zcash (ZEC) communities intensified on Sunday as the value of Zcash rallied to over $700 after falling to a low of $598 on Saturday.
“The 'Bitcoin only, every thing else is a scam' crowd goes to be really confused attempting to work out what to say about Zcash,” said Hunter Horsley, CEO of investment firm Bitwise, in an X post that sparked a firestorm of reactions.
“No, we’re quite comfortable calling this apparently coordinated pump-and-dump of a VC coin a scam,” Bit Paine responded, pointing to Zcash’s 1,500% rally since October.
Zcash experienced a historic price rally that began in October. Source: TradingView
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of distant procedure call (RPC) node provider Helius and a vocal Zcash supporter, agreed with Horsely, calling the Bitcoin community's criticism of the privacy coin conspiracy theories.
Zcash broke eight-year highs in October, surpassing Monero (XMR) to develop into the leading privacy coin by market cap. At the time of writing, Zcash had a market cap of over $11.2 billion and reinvigorated the privacy discussion within the crypto industry.
The Zcash rally reinvigorates the privacy conversation as industry leaders advocate for it
According to CoinMarketCap, Zcash is the twelfth largest cryptocurrency by market cap and is poised to enter the highest 10 by displacing the Cardano network's native token ADA (ADA), which has a market cap of over $17 billion on the time of writing.
In November, Arthur Hayes, founding father of crypto exchange BitMEX, said that Zcash was now the second-largest liquid investment of Maelstrom, his family office, with BTC being the fund's largest liquid asset.
Leap Therapeutics, a biotech company, was renamed Cypherpunk Technologies, a Zcash finance company, on Wednesday with backing from the Winklevoss Capital of the Winklevoss Twins, causing its shares to hop over 170% on the news.
The meteoric price rise has also revived talks about integrating privacy into the Bitcoin protocol through the reactivation of a Bitcoin opcode called OP_CAT, which may enable privacy and other advanced features natively within the Bitcoin protocol.
