Zcash surged double digits to $1,388 Thursday, after the community settled the shape of its next network upgrade. ZEC is currently trading at $1,368, up 10.9% on the day and 168% over 30 days, making it the ninth-largest asset by market cap at $22.9 billion, per CoinGecko data.

The privacy coin’s move up the rankings signals that “the market is redefining the value of privacy,” according to Tim Sun, senior researcher at HashKey, with Zcash “the leading front-runner in this wave of narratives.”

Roxana Nasoi, a core contributor at privacy network Logos, framed its appeal more bluntly, arguing that, “Privacy denies everyone else the knowledge that makes you a target.”

NU7, ETF and privacy

Five questions on the NU7 upgrade went to a coinholder vote whose results were published on Sunday, on a turnout of 66%. Eligibility was fixed by spendable shielded ZEC held in the Ironwood pool at block 3,459,350 on August 24, one coin to one vote, and ballots were encrypted and split into 16 unlinkable pieces so totals could be counted without revealing who voted or how much they held. Holders voted 98.9% to keep Bitcoin-style halvings rather than smooth issuance, and also chose faster 25-second blocks, immediate deprecation of the legacy Sprout pool, and a cut in scope to whatever is ready by September 30.

One question divided the community. On when the network sustainability mechanism should start recycling fees back to miners, coinholders picked February 2031 by 96.6%, while the advisory panels favored “as soon as possible.”

Shielded Labs, Project Tachyon, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation and Valar Group have since said they are aligned on the February 2031 date as “the most conservative interpretation of the results,” with another poll able to revisit it.

ZEC is up more than 2,500% over the past year, a rise Nasoi put down partly to the launch of Grayscale’s ETF last month, giving institutions “a route to Zcash that didn’t exist before.”

Privacy coins have drawn attention since that fund launched in August, said Sun, which “alleviated regulatory concerns” and coincided with a shift in the pitch for the sector.

The case has moved “from pure anonymity to financial privacy and confidentiality,” he added, a distinction sharpened by AI “rapidly reducing the cost of identifying address behaviors, counterparties, and asset changes.”

“The world is waking up to the need for on chain privacy,” argued Joe Andrews, chief executive of Aztec Labs. He pointed to three months in which Zcash has “dealt with a critical bug, shipped post quantum upgrades to harden the protocol” and seen the token treble.

Zcash’s Ironwood upgrade activated in July after researchers found a four-year-old flaw that could have allowed counterfeit ZEC to be minted. Disclosure sent the price down 38%. The upgrade trapped any counterfeit coins in the retired pool and added quantum-resistant transaction records.