Reason to trust
How Our News is Made
Strict editorial policy that focuses on accuracy, relevance, and impartiality
Ad discliamer
Morbi pretium leo et nisl aliquam mollis. Quisque arcu lorem, ultricies quis pellentesque nec, ullamcorper eu odio.
Cypherpunk Technologies CIO Will McEvoy is making a blunt case for Zcash: the market is undervaluing ZEC because it still has no coherent way to price privacy. In a thread published Tuesday, McEvoy argued that the discount is especially striking as AI-driven surveillance expands and demand for financial confidentiality becomes easier to justify.
McEvoy’s core claim is simple. “Zcash is the most mispriced asset in crypto because privacy is the most mispriced asset in society,” he wrote. “The market has no real framework for valuing privacy so it gets ignored. The upside is asymmetric nonetheless.”
Why Zcash Could Be ‘Mispriced’
He built that argument around relative size. At the time of his post, McEvoy put ZEC at $263 with a $4.4 billion market capitalization. Against that, he listed Bitcoin at $1.45 trillion, gold at $34.8 trillion, offshore wealth at $11.3 trillion, stablecoins at $312 billion, and Monero at $6.8 billion. The point was less about direct comparability than scale: by McEvoy’s framing, Zcash remains “just a rounding error” in every market it could plausibly intersect.
That thesis runs through each benchmark. Relative to Bitcoin, McEvoy argued Zcash is still tiny enough that even a modest re-rating would imply a large move. He wrote that if ZEC reached 0.5% of Bitcoin’s value, it would imply a price of $446, or about 1.7 times higher. At 1%, the implied price rises to $891; at 2%, $1,782; and at 5%, $4,456. His summary line was as compressed as the valuation case itself: “Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin.”
The offshore wealth comparison is more pointed. McEvoy described privacy not as a niche preference, but as something people have historically paid for at scale. “There is $11.3 trillion in offshore wealth,” he wrote. “People pay a premium for privacy. They always have. They always will.” From there, he argued that if Zcash captured 0.1% of that market, the implied price would be $680. At 0.5%, it would be $3,402, and at 1%, $6,804. “Zcash is a Swiss bank account in your pocket,” he added.
His gold comparison extends the same logic into a more traditional store-of-value frame. “Gold is private. You can hold it. No one knows how much you have,” McEvoy wrote. “Zcash has the same properties but it’s digital, portable, and programmable.” On that basis, he modeled ZEC at $1,048 if it reached 0.05% of gold’s value, $2,095 at 0.1%, and $10,477 at 0.5%.
McEvoy also positioned Zcash as a response to the visibility built into much of crypto’s existing payment infrastructure. “Stablecoin transactions are tracked. Wallets are surveilled,” he wrote, before laying out price scenarios based on ZEC reaching 5%, 10%, or 25% of the stablecoin market. Those levels implied prices of $939, $1,877, and $4,692, respectively.
He also compared Zcash to Monero. McEvoy argued Zcash offers “stronger cryptography, optional transparency for compliance, and better scalability,” then laid out a simple relative-value table: parity with Monero would imply $410 for ZEC, double Monero’s value would imply $819, and five times Monero’s value would imply $2,047. “The privacy coin throne is not yet claimed,” he wrote.
His closing point tied the whole thesis to a broader technological shift. “Artificial intelligence is the attack. Zcash is the defense,” McEvoy said. “AI decodes all the data. Zcash encrypts all the data. AI is the surveillance state. Zcash is the sovereign individual. As AI advances, privacy becomes more valuable, not less.”
At press time, ZEC traded at $244.77.
