Zcash Falls to $550 After $25M Funding, Holds 33% Weekly Gain

Zcash (ZEC) fell to $550 on May 11 after a sharp rally in early May. The token peaked just under $640 on May 9 before retreating to $550 by 11 a.m. EST on May 11 and later edged up to $555.

The decline represented about a 7% drop over 24 hours but left ZEC roughly 33% higher than it was seven days earlier. The seven-day run began when ZEC traded below $420 on May 4 and rose rapidly in subsequent sessions.

Investors committed $25 million to the protocol in a financing round that included a16z, Paradigm, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies and Maelstrom.

During the rally ZEC’s market value rose to just under $10 billion, keeping it the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Josh Swihart, founder of Zcash Open Development Lab, described the recent price action as validation of protocol changes and urged investors to back the team’s development direction.

The token’s recovery follows a tense start to the year when the Zcash development team resigned amid a governance dispute with the Bootstrap board. The resignations were followed by a sell-off that pushed ZEC below $400 for several weeks.

Critics have pointed to low participation in shielded addresses as a limit on privacy. A user on X wrote, “ZEC isn’t private anyway, btw, if only 30% of the supply sits in the shielded pool. The other 70% being transparent is enough to capture data on the specific deposits within the shielded pool with turnstile crossings that chain analytics firms use to link flows.”

Traders are weighing the fresh capital and developer endorsements against unresolved governance and privacy questions. Price volatility and debate over shielded-pool liquidity are factors market participants say they will watch in the coming weeks.