In February, you could have bought Zcash for about $191. On Sept. 16, the same coin traded at $1,335.51. Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss looked at that run and said it reminded him of 2019.
That’s a specific comparison, and a loaded one. Before you decide whether it holds up, it helps to remember what 2019 felt like for anyone who lived through it.
What 2019 felt like
Bitcoin started that year in bad shape. The 2017 speculative frenzy had turned into the brutal 2018 bear market. Prices were depressed and retail enthusiasm had evaporated.
Bitcoin was worth roughly $3,693 on Jan. 1, 2019. By late June it had rallied to around $13,000. Then it gave back some of those gains and entered 2020 around $7,195.
The price chart was chaos. But the people watching closely weren’t talking about moonshots. They were talking about institutional infrastructure and custody. The broader industry was having the same conversation.
Winklevoss appears to be suggesting that Zcash has that same kind of energy right now: volatile on the surface, serious underneath.
Zcash’s 2026 chart is not a straight line
ZEC’s rally sounds clean when you only quote the September high. The full year is messier.
Zcash opened January around $511 and then went through a steep correction. February was worse. ZEC fell approximately 27% that month and briefly traded around $191.
May was the first real breakout. ZEC jumped more than 60%, hit a monthly high above $680 and closed the month around $565.
August added another leg. Zcash climbed roughly 85%, from approximately $457 to about $848. By early September it was trading above $1,000, and it reached $1,335.51 on Sept. 16.
If you bought in January and held through February, you watched most of your money disappear before it came back. That’s the part of the 2019 comparison people tend to skip.
An old coin with a new story
Zcash isn’t new. The network launched in 2016. It uses zero-knowledge proofs, which let transactions be validated without exposing their details.
For most of its life, that made Zcash awkward to hold. Privacy advocates backed it on principle. Some exchanges dropped privacy coins entirely because of regulatory scrutiny.
In 2026, the mood flipped. Privacy came back as both an investment theme and a technology story, and Zcash rode it harder than anything else in the category.
Gemini isn’t a neutral observer
You should read Winklevoss’s comment with his company’s track record in mind. Gemini has been tied to Zcash for years.
In 2018, Gemini became the first licensed exchange to offer Zcash trading and custody after getting approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services. In August 2025, it added support for Zcash Unified Addresses. Three months later, it added support for Orchard, Zcash’s newer privacy protocol.
On Jan. 27, Gemini launched a dedicated Zcash credit card. And on Sept. 29, the exchange said the infrastructure it uses to interact with the Zcash blockchain now runs on Zakura, a newer open-source full node written in Rust.
That’s a lot of engineering spent on one asset. It gives Winklevoss real credibility when he talks about Zcash. It also means his exchange benefits when people agree with him.
The 2019 comparison is useful if you take the whole thing. Bitcoin went from $3,693 to around $13,000 that year and still ended at roughly $7,195. If you’re buying ZEC because of the September chart, plan for a February, not just another August.
