Zcash gains 20% as Paradigm founder reveals firm made ZEC investment

Zcash’s native token ZEC recorded a sharp intraday rise after Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang publicly stated the crypto investment firm bought ZEC and is backing the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL). The privacy-oriented network, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide addresses and amounts in shielded transactions, was trading around $1,338 at the time of reporting. The move helped extend ZEC’s recent rally: the token has risen roughly 160% over the past month, far outpacing Bitcoin’s 18.2% gain in the same span according to Coingecko. Markets overall were buoyed around the same time by the Federal Reserve’s 25 basis point rate increase to a 3.75%–4.0% range, the central bank’s first hike since 2023. Huang framed Zcash as a “private complement to Bitcoin” and voiced support for its inflation-funded developer fund, saying sustained financing matters as cyber threats and quantum computing evolve. He also recommended combining Zcash coin voting with other governance mechanisms to reduce monetary unpredictability — comments that follow a recent holder poll on the NU7 upgrade, in which nearly unanimous participation backed shortening target block times and leaving the halving schedule intact. Developers aim to finalize NU7’s feature set by Sept. 30, though specific activation dates have not been set. Paradigm’s involvement in the Zcash ecosystem was previously disclosed: ZODL announced a seed round of more than $25 million in March that included Paradigm alongside investors such as a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital. Separately, on-chain data provider Glassnode showed privacy coins broadly have outperformed the market, with the sector 213% above its level at Bitcoin’s October 2025 peak and a privacy-coin basket excluding ZEC up about 85% over the past year.