Zcash Could Rise to $420 After 62% Weekly Price Spike, Traders Predict

In brief

• Zcash (ZEC) is up more than 62% this week, recently trading around $380.
• Predictors on Myriad now favor the privacy token to move to $420 during the month, another 10% move higher.
• Optimism has swelled in the last 24 hours, representing a 40% odds shift on Myriad's prediction market.

Traders have flipped optimistic on an even bigger near-term surge for privacy-focused token Zcash (ZEC) after a nearly 62% boost in the last week of trading.

ZEC is changing hands around $379.89 on Friday, up 15% in the last 24 hours, 62% in the last week, and now more than 77% in the last month. 

That move has shifted odds of the token jumping to $420 in April—a further 10% move up—to 60% on Myriad, a prediction market operated by Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan.

The odds shift represents a significant boost in optimism among predictors, who overwhelmingly sided against the token’s jump to $420 as recent as Thursday. At the time, odds stood around 80% against an April move to $420.

A specific catalyst for the token’s move is difficult to pinpoint, though crypto’s top assets are all moving up strongly following the conditional ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran.

It has not been a privacy-specific move either. While the category has risen 21% on the week, according to data from CoinGecko, its performance is largely buoyed by ZEC and DASH—the latter of which has jumped around 48% in the last week of trading. Other popular crypto tokens with a connection to privacy, like Monero (XMR) and ZKsync (ZK) have jumped 6.1% and fallen 4.4% during that time, respectively. 

Zcash has strongly outperformed crypto majors of late, with Bitcoin trading around $72,531 on Friday, a 9% move higher in the last week of trading. Meanwhile, Ethereum has jumped similarly, boosting 8.5% in the last seven days to trade around $2,226.

Despite the token’s weekly gain, it still sits nearly 46% off its November high of $698, and even further from its all-time high of $3,191 set in October 2016.

At the end of March, a critical vulnerability in the Zcash node software was patched, derisking millions of dollars' worth of tokens in the process.