How Zcash Went From Low-profile Token To The Most-searched Asset In...

Halving math, shielded growth and NU6.1 governance turned Zcash from a low-profile relic into November’s most-searched crypto.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Source: CoinTelegraph