The coins that hide transactions are climbing while bitcoin falls

Between 1 September and 13 November 2025 Zcash went from $40.55 to $519.51, a rise of 1181 percent; the highest close of the period was $645.44 on 7 November. Over the same stretch Bitcoin fell 9 percent, from $109,237 to $99,692.

What they are, and why now

The coins being talked about these days are built so that those two things can’t be seen. When you use zcash, monero or dash with the privacy function switched on, whoever looks at the ledger doesn’t see who sent how much to whom. It is the difference between paying in cash and paying by card.

Until a few weeks ago they were treated as a niche for people with something to hide, and that judgment kept them at the margins. Then something happened that hadn’t been seen in years: while bitcoin was falling below a hundred thousand dollars and the market was burning more than a billion in positions closed by force, they took off.

The rule that comes into force in seven weeks

It isn’t a hypothesis or a proposal under discussion: it is an approved rule, with the first transmission due in 2027 covering the operations of 2026. In practice, from next year every purchase, sale and transfer made on a registered platform travels to the tax office by itself, the way it already does with bank accounts.

Whoever is buying these coins isn’t betting on a technology: they are moving ahead of a deadline. It is an uncomfortable reading but a consistent one on the timing — the climb starts in September, speeds up in October, and the rule’s calendar has been public for months.

What an exchange reports, to be precise

What a platform will have to send to the tax office of the country you live in is: your full identity, your tax residence with the identifying number, every single operation — crypto to currency, crypto to crypto, and outgoing transfers — and the balance for every asset you hold. The self-certification has to be renewed every 36 months.

From 1 January 2026 the trading platforms have to transmit to the tax authorities: the user’s full identity; tax residence and identifying number; every operation from crypto to currency, from crypto to crypto and every transfer; the balance for each type of asset. The self-certification is renewed every 36 months and the first transmission is due on 31 January 2027.

Put another way: for tax purposes a trading platform becomes the same thing as a bank. It isn’t that they “might know”: they will know, automatically, everything. And this is where the thing bites its own tail, because almost everybody is buying these coins on exactly those platforms — identity document, selfie and residence already handed over.

The numbers, recomputed by us

Bitcoin, over the same stretch, went from $109,237 to $99,692: minus 9 percent, and minus 20 from the 6 October high. It is that distance that makes the news, not zcash’s number on its own: in a market that is falling, three coins from the same family climb together.

Two statements went along with the move, and it is right to say so because the market listened to them: on the first of October Naval Ravikant wrote that bitcoin is insurance against state currencies and zcash is insurance against bitcoin; Arthur Hayes said he expects zcash at ten thousand dollars. The first came ahead of a jump of sixty percent in a day, the second ahead of thirty percent. Those are the source’s numbers, not ours, and they should be taken for what they are: coincidences in time on a market that was already running.

Put bluntly: for two years the private coins were “criminal stuff”, then a date turned up on the tax office’s calendar and they became an investment category.

And on the other side, supply halved

And there is a measure that says how much of that demand is for use and not for the bet: how many tokens sit inside the shielded part of the ledger, that is, in addresses that genuinely hide sender and amount. There are 4.9 million of them, between 27 and 30 percent of everything that exists — the highest ever recorded — and shielded transactions are 7 times what they were before the wallet upgrade.

Money that never touches the platforms moved around it as well: a regulated fund giving exposure to zcash without having to hold it managed $137 million. And on dash the top hundred addresses held 37 percent of supply, the highest concentration of the decade — a double-edged fact, because the same figure reads both as accumulation by people who know and as the fragility of a market in few hands.

There is work under the price too

The Ethereum Foundation put together a group dedicated to privacy — forty-seven researchers, engineers and cryptographers — with the aim of bringing private transactions onto the main blockchain rather than onto a layer built above it. It isn’t a side project: it is a choice of direction by the foundation that governs the sector’s second network.

And in October zcash released the upgrade that makes the shielded wallet usable from a phone, which is the point where this technology has always stopped: it worked, but only for the people who knew how to use it. How much of this climb holds depends on which of the two forces weighs more — the tax deadline, which is an event, or usability, which is a process.