What’s Behind The Surge In Privacy Tokens As The Rest Of The Market...

Sanctions cases and prosecutions involving mixers and wallets have raised questions about the line between infrastructure and money transmission, pushing compliance teams toward cautious de-risking.

Analysts are split between seeing the move as a protest trade against surveillance and a fragile late-cycle spike in a shrinking high-risk corner of the market.

Over the past six weeks, the crypto market has shed more than $1 trillion as traders rotate out of speculative assets. Total market capitalization has fallen from peaks above $4.3 trillion in early October to just over $3.1 trillion, a drawdown of about 25%-28%.

Bitcoin is down close to 30% from its early October all-time high above $126,000 and is now trading in the low $90,000s.

At the same time, Zcash has surged to the top of Coinbase’s internal search rankings, surpassing Bitcoin (BTC) and XRP (XRP) in user queries, a sign that retail attention has followed the move.

Analysts say the combination of sharp gains and rising search interest looks like a classic hot trade. The complicating factor is that it is happening in a part of the market facing mounting regulatory pressure, exchange delistings and sanctions-related scrutiny.

The latest move has clearly been led by Zcash, with Monero following at a distance.

ZEC is up well over 200% in about a month on some major venues.

From late summer lows, point-to-point moves in ZEC reach high triple-digit percentage gains.

Monero has risen, too, but far less, allowing ZEC to briefly overtake it by market capitalization.

Source: CoinTelegraph