Zcash Clears $1,200 With ZEC Futures Open Interest Past $2 Billion

Open interest in Zcash perpetual futures reached $2.4 billion on Friday, against roughly $700 million in early July. ZEC passed $1,200 late on Sunday. Traders holding the short side spent the weekend being squeezed, and three separate counts of what that cost them do not agree. Grayscale's spot fund has kept adding assets through the run. The price prints do not settle either.

Five screens, five prices

Nobody publishes the same quote. CoinGecko had ZEC at $1,192.67 on Sunday, up 12.3% on the day and 42.7% over the week, in a 24-hour range of $1,062.66 to $1,249.28. COINOTAG's snapshot at 06:56 UTC that morning gave $1,179.16 and a range of $1,125.51 to $1,256.98, which overlaps CoinGecko's at neither end. coin-turk wrote up $1,170 and a 15% move the same day. crypto.news, filing on Monday, put the price near $1,228. CoinDesk said only that ZEC passed $1,200 late Sunday. None of the five names the venue behind its print, and they do not reconcile.

Three counts of one liquidation day

What the squeeze cost is on the record three ways. coin-turk counted about $212 million liquidated across the market in 24 hours, roughly $156 million of it shorts, with ZEC the largest single asset at $45.32 million. Crypto Briefing gave the same $212 million total and put ZEC short liquidations in a band of $34.5 million to $44 million. COINOTAG counted $125.05 million in total, of which $109.61 million were shorts, and $38.70 million in ZEC. COINOTAG states that its table covers only the top 20 assets rather than the whole market. That explains part of the gap in the totals and none of it in the ZEC figure, which is one asset in all three counts. The three do not reconcile.

Bad positioning has a visible face in this one. A single Hyperliquid wallet short 32,760 ZEC at an average entry of $444 was carrying $25.7 million of unrealized loss with the price above $1,200, on figures crypto.news published on Monday citing the blockchain analyst Ember. The same wallet holds a $107 million bitcoin long showing $4.42 million of gain, against $2.05 million of funding fees paid on it. The position was still open at the time of writing. That account stands alone. No other outlet reviewed here carries the wallet or its numbers, and the analyst's attribution of it to a named individual is unconfirmed.

Two scoreboards for the same fund

Grayscale's ZCSH, which listed on NYSE Arca at a 2.5% sponsor fee on 25 August, is the institutional half of this. BeInCrypto put its net assets at $463.2 million on Friday against about $260 million at conversion, with 444,608 ZEC held across 5.55 million shares. The Block, writing that Friday, counted $34.4 million of net inflows since the listing, the strongest day being 2 September at $12.6 million. Those two measure different things. Net assets move with price, while net inflows count money arriving. No outlet reviewed here reconciles the series or says how much of the difference is appreciation.

"As AI reshapes how financial activity can be monitored, we believe demand for genuine financial privacy will only grow," said Steve Vanourny, Grayscale's head of index.

Where the coins went

The supply behind the rally keeps moving out of sight. FXStreet counted 4.86 million ZEC in shielded addresses on Friday, 28.76% of the total, with the Ironwood pool holding 3.86 million of that. Shielded means the amounts are hidden on-chain. Mining economics have not followed the price. The Block put revenue on the Z15 Pro at $708 per megawatt-hour against $727 on 24 August, about 3% lower over a stretch in which ZEC roughly doubled from the level where it first cleared $1,000. One retail oddity has grown alongside it on Solana, where CoinDesk reports that a memecoin called Anonymous Cat has paid holders about 2,320 ZEC, worth roughly $2.8 million, by taxing its own transfers 3%. No other outlet reviewed here carries that. The fund's next disclosure covers the days after the $1,200 print, and it is the first document that will show whether money followed the chart.