Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Privacy coins Zcash and Monero lead a flat $3 trillion crypto market
Zcash rose 3% and Monero 2.14% over 24 hours to lead the largest coins, while Bitcoin gained 0.59%. The $30.25 million that left Grayscale's Zcash ETF on Sept. 30 equals about 0.13% of Zcash's $23.18 billion market value.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- On Sept. 16 the Federal Reserve lifted rates to 3.75%-4.00%, the first increase since July 2023.
- September payrolls rose by 29,000 against the 84,000 economists expected, and unemployment ticked up to 4.2%.
- Solana gained 1.4% and XRP 1.07% over the same 24 hours, while BNB lost 0.41% and Tron 0.22%.
- Grayscale's Zcash ETF still shows about $268 million in net inflows since its Aug. 25 launch, after counting that day's outflow.
- Zcash still trades about 19% below the $1,698 high it set in late September.
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Why it matters
- constraint Zcash and Monero together make up about 1.1% of the market's value, so a holder weighted by market value got almost none of the day's best moves.
- exposure Monero has about 0.65% of room above the $558.69 level Decrypt says it must hold, so it is the privacy coin nearest a chart break.
- contradiction Decrypt puts Zcash's recent peak near $1,600 in one passage and at $1,698 in another. Measured from $1,600, the pullback is about 14%, five points shallower.
Against the next tier of large coins the privacy lead is narrow, or rather, it is narrow for Monero. Zcash's gain is 1.6 percentage points ahead of Solana's, and Monero's beats it by 0.74 points [20]. Ethereum added 0.34% [1].
Decrypt puts the stillness at the top of the market down to two forces that cancel out: the September hike, and the shrinking odds of another one [31]. Right after the payrolls report, CME FedWatch put the chance of an October hike at about 22% [8].
Grayscale's flows are small next to the coin the fund tracks. The Sept. 30 redemptions took back about 11% of the net money the fund had gathered since launch [22]. That whole net intake equals roughly 1.2% of Zcash's $23.18 billion market value [24]. Even so, Zcash slid to $1,333.50 intraday on Oct. 1, a 21.5% fall from its late-September high, one day after the date Decrypt gives for the outflow [11][25][10].
The run to that high was 253% from $480.72. It coincided with the ETF's Aug. 25 launch and a 98.9% holder vote on Sept. 17 to keep Bitcoin-style halvings [14]. Over 12 months the coin is up about 2,500% [13]. It has fallen further than this before: Zcash dropped 38% in this year's Ironwood counterfeiting scare, then recovered past $1,600 [15].
Three outcomes fit the charts Decrypt describes. Zcash, at $1,372.69, can consolidate under resistance at $1,403.89, about 2.3% higher, while the ETF goes back to taking in cash [17][26]. Redemptions can repeat and push it toward the 38.2% retracement at $1,221.93, about 11% lower [27]. Or Monero breaks its support before Zcash does. On a faster gauge it is deep in overbought territory, and it has traded sideways since late September [18].
I think this is consolidation after a 253% run [14], and the Grayscale outflow is too small against Zcash's value to explain the slide by itself. The counter-thesis is that the fund arrived as a new buyer during that run. A buyer that turns seller can move a price more than its 1.2% share of market value implies [24]. A second outflow day near the Sept. 30 size, landing alongside a print below $1,333.50, would prove that view wrong [10][11].
What to watch
- The Fed's October meeting, where a second hike in two months would test whether large-cap coins stay flat.
- Whether Bitcoin clears resistance at $87,354 after its second golden cross.