Zcash Tops $490 After Nym Adopts Ironwood, Grants Shift

On Aug. 3, Zcash (ZEC) rose nearly 5% to a session high just under $494, recovering from about $470 at 4:10 a.m. EST to mid-morning levels. The gain put ZEC’s market capitalization back above $8 billion and represents roughly an 8% increase since the start of the month.

The price movement followed two developments. Nym integrated Zcash’s Ironwood shielded pool, enabling direct, end-to-end shielded ZEC payments for Nym network services. Zcash also launched a retroactive grants program that moves treasury distribution to coinholder voting carried out inside the shielded pool.

A shielded pool routes transactions with privacy features that keep sender, recipient and amounts hidden on the public ledger. The Ironwood integration allows those private transfers to occur within Nym’s network for service payments, and the grants voting uses the same private transaction layer.

ZEC’s rally helped push the combined market capitalization of privacy-focused coins over $30 billion. Other tokens that rose included NEAR (about 2.4%), ZK (about 4.5%) and NOCK (about 5.3%). Tokens with declines included ZANO (down roughly 5.5%), ZBT (down about 6.5%) and COTI (down about 10.2%). Monero was down around 0.3% over the most recent seven-day period.

Will McEvoy, chief investment officer at Cypherpunk, wrote on X that privacy is crypto’s “last frontier,” and noted that zero-knowledge technology has moved from early experiments to practical use.

Market participants will monitor whether Nym’s integration and the shielded, coinholder grants process lead to continued demand for shielded ZEC transfers and further price changes.