How Zcash Became Coinbase’s Most-Searched Crypto in November

Key takeaways:

• Zcash surged more than 10x within weeks, briefly returning to large-cap territory with a valuation above $10 billion.

• On Coinbase, ZEC became the most-searched asset in mid-November, surpassing both Bitcoin and XRP.

• The rally is supported by several real shifts: the 2024 halving, rising shielded balances and the NU6.1 holder-controlled funding model.

• Analysts are divided, with some calling the move a blow-off top and others viewing it as a repricing driven by renewed interest in “responsible” privacy coins amid stricter AML rules.

Zcash wasn’t expected to become a major story this market cycle. For most of the past few years, the privacy coin remained in the background while Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP (XRP) and a rotating cast of memecoins dominated headlines and trading activity.

Then November arrived.

In just a few days, Zcash (ZEC) climbed to the top of Coinbase’s search rankings. A screenshot shared by Zcash adviser Thor Torrens showed ZEC drawing around 52,000 searches on the platform. This was ahead of both XRP and Bitcoin, which recorded roughly 41,000 and 39,000 searches, respectively.

At the same time, ZEC’s price had already surged, delivering a four-digit percentage gain over the past year and briefly pushing the token back into the large-cap bracket.

For a coin many traders had written off as a relic of the previous privacy cycle, the question now is simple: How did Zcash go from low-profile to most-searched in a single month?

Did you know? Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox is a longtime cypherpunk who worked on DigiCash in the 1990s and helped create projects such as Tahoe-LAFS, the BLAKE2 hash function and the concept known as Zooko’s Triangle long before ZEC launched.

How Zcash slipped into low-profile relic status

For readers who haven’t looked at it in years, it is worth remembering what Zcash actually is.

Launched in 2016 as a Bitcoin-style proof-of-work (PoW) chain with a hard cap of 21 million coins, it was built around cutting-edge zero-knowledge proofs. These allow users to send either transparent transactions, similar to Bitcoin, or fully shielded transactions where amounts and addresses are hidden but still mathematically verifiable.

For a while, it was treated as a kind of “science project with a price,” backed by heavyweight cryptographers and privacy advocates.

Then the spotlight moved on. As regulators increased scrutiny of privacy coins, several major exchanges delisted or restricted them, and Monero (XMR) gradually became the default choice for die-hard privacy users.

ZEC slid down the market capitalization rankings, daily volumes thinned out, and social chatter faded. By early 2024, despite having survived two halving events and multiple network upgrades, it looked more like a legacy token from an earlier era than a contender for a new narrative.

The slow turnaround: Halvings, shielded usage and a governance reset

The November spike did not come out of nowhere. Zcash spent the past two years quietly reshaping its underlying story, while most of the market was not paying attention.

On the monetary side, the most recent halving on Nov. 23, 2024, cut the block reward from 3.125 ZEC to 1.5625 ZEC, reducing daily new issuance from roughly 3,600 coins to about 1,800. With a fixed supply of 21 million and halving cycles now running on a tighter post-Blossom schedule, ZEC began to be discussed in “sound money” terms by parts of the community.

Under the hood, actual usage was shifting as well. Coinbase research notes that the amount of ZEC held in shielded addresses climbed from about 1.7 million coins to roughly 4.5 million over the past year, with more than 1 million coins moving into shielded pools within a three-week window.

Overall, more than 27% of the circulating supply is now shielded, and other trackers show the peak shielded supply briefly rising above 5 million coins. This suggests that users are not just trading the ticker.

At the same time, the new funding and governance structure went live. The NU6.1 upgrade, activated on Nov. 24, 2025, allocates 8% of block rewards to community grants and 12% to a coinholder-controlled fund. This gives ZEC holders a formal say in how millions of dollars in development capital are deployed between now and the next halving in 2028.

Together, these changes laid the groundwork for a rerating long before search volumes surged.

Did you know? The Electric Coin Company commissioned Rand Europe to study criminal use of Zcash. The researchers found that ZEC had only a minor presence on the dark web and that Bitcoin remained the dominant currency for illicit activity.

Privacy revival, Monero exploit and new AML rules

The spark for all this was a mix of narrative and timing.

Privacy suddenly returned to focus after a high-profile exploit in Monero shook confidence in the sector’s default choice. Commentators began looking for an alternative with active governance and a clear upgrade path. With a…