ZEC rallies 136% in a month as Arthur Hayes sets target at 10% of Bitcoin's price

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, has jumped on the Zcash (ZEC) bandwagon, as the token is in the middle of a 36% rally in the past 24 hours to trade at $587. The latest figure means the cryptocurrency has risen by 136% over the past month.

The latest rally comes as prominent crypto figures staked out aggressive price targets and the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin’s legacy addresses renewed interest in privacy-focused alternatives.

Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, who has been historically bullish on Zcash, posted on X, “Remember the $ZEC target is 10% of $BTC’s price.”

With BTC trading around $81,300, that implies a ZEC price north of $8,130, over 13 times its current level. Hayes who has been bullish on Zcash added “We got a lot of pamping to go.”

Bitcoin, which has its own bulls, has also been projected to account for as high as 70% of the cryptocurrency market capitalization by Ark Invest, which projects the whole market to hit $28 trillion by 2030. 

The Zcash momentum is months old 

This ZEC price rally has been gathering pace for a while. Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain disclosed that his firm has built a significant position in $ZEC since February,” adding that “Zcash is a return to the cypherpunk ideals crypto was founded on.”

An earlier Cryptopolitan report highlighted that ZEC open interest climbed past $813 million, approaching levels last seen in late 2024 and late 2025. On Hyperliquid, 66% of open positions were short, setting the stage for a squeeze that appears to be playing out in real time.

One whale tracked by Onchain Lens deposited $4.997 million in USDC into HyperLiquid on May 6 to avoid liquidation on an 18,286 ZEC short position leveraged at 10x. The whale’s floating loss was more than $2.36 million, with a new liquidation price of $855.34.

If ZEC continues climbing, forced buy-ins from positions like this could accelerate the move.

Quantum risk and privacy premium power ZEC

ZEC’s rally comes at a time when the crypto industry grapples with quantum computing and the growing conversation of its threat to Bitcoin and cryptography as a whole.

Discussions about quantum risk dominated both on-stage panels and private conversations at a Bitcoin conference that was held in Las Vegas on May 2, according to Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn.

One emerging consensus, according to Thorn, was that Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins, held in older Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) addresses, “should not be touched,” even as the vulnerability of those exposed public keys becomes clearer.

Zcash’s shielded transaction technology offers a different model, with around 30% of the ZEC supply now sitting in shielded pools, according to ZecHub data. Those coins are not exposed to quantum-era cryptographic attacks in the same way unshielded Bitcoin UTXOs are, and they are unlikely to hit exchanges.

The Zcash Foundation reinforced the network’s security posture on May 2 with the release of Zebra 4.4.0, patching five vulnerabilities, including three consensus-critical bugs that could have split the network. This came after the market saw up to $651 million in crypto exploit losses across nearly 30 separate attacks in April 2026, according to CertiK.

How can this Zcash rally go?

If Bitcoin reaches the six-figure targets that several institutional forecasters have outlined, ZEC at 10% would imply prices will be $10,000 and above, making Hayes’s 10% framework simple to model and aggressive at the same time.

At current levels, that means the rally would need to multiply another 17 to 25 times from here.

Strategy CEO Phong Le offered a reminder of how large the Bitcoin denominator could get, stating on May 6 that “if we’re the largest holder of Bitcoin in 10 to 20 years, we will be the largest company in the world.”

The odds of ZEC attaining the projected ratio to BTC and maintaining it are an open question. The coin has a history of sharp rallies followed by extended drawdowns. However, with more institutional buy-ins from the likes of Multicoin, growing shielded supply, and a renewed focus on cryptographic privacy, the current odds seem to be in its favor.

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