ZEC Price Prediction

The price of ZEC today is $483.95, changing within the past 24 hours for -7% and 9.74% over the week. ZEC’s price action is characterized by the Bullish sentiment.

The current volatility index for ZEC is measured at 12.71%. ZEC’s circulating supply is 16.47M. In the big picture, the highest price ZEC has reached is $5,941.8 and its lowest observed price was $16.0413.

What is Zcash and ZEC?

Zcash is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency that is traded under the ticker ZEC on cryptocurrency exchanges. Its signature feature is masking the transaction amounts and addresses, which is achieved by the technology called zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs). If users want to, they can anonymously send Zcash to other users, and no one except the transaction participants will be able to see the details.

Learn more about Zcash and the tech it pioneered, read our ZEC Guide for Beginners!

Zcash Halving

The privacy-oriented crypto is modeled after Bitcoin, so its issuance model is the same. It has a limited supply of 21 million coins and roughly every four years the rate at which new coins are minted is reduced in half. Now the reward for every block is 6.25 ZEC, but after the halving it will be 3.125 ZEC.

In Zcash, at the time of the halving, Founder’s Reward will also be replaced with funding streams. The key difference between the two is the destination of the collected funds: from the halving onwards, the founders reward will be replaced with developer’s fund. Developer’s fund will be used for grants and bootstrap projects.

Before we look into any ZEC price prediction and try to forecast the future, it is important to try to understand what can drive the changes in price.

What can influence the Zcash price?

Halving

Despite the fact that the upcoming halving will be the first for Zcash, long-time investors and bulls are already looking forward to it. The idea behind reducing the minting rate is that the supply of Zcash will be growing shorter. If the demand stays the same or increases, the decrease in supply will drive the price of ZEC higher. On the other hand, halving can make mining momentarily twice less profitable, and can cause miners to leave. Miners secure the network by performing computations, so if they leave, the network might become less secure and susceptible to a possible attack.

Regulatory Challenges

Due to the anonymous nature of the currency, Zcash warrants more attention from the law enforcement that is now entering the blockchain space. Centralized exchanges, to avoid having regulatory issues, prefer not to list privacy-centered currencies.

Privacy in Zcash is optional. Most users do not opt in to use the Z-addresses (or shielded addresses that anonymous transactions can be made with) because they are slower and require more computational resources. Despite that, Zcash is strongly associated with privacy currencies and still has difficulties with listings on most centralized exchanges.

Surveillance and Privacy Laws

Bitcoin started as a pseudonymous means of payment that was supposed to give the people control over finance back. However, as time went by, blockchain analysis developed and the regulators became more savvy in tracking the funds. As mass surveillance is getting more widespread, some believe that in search for privacy, more people will turn to privacy coins.

ZEC Sentiment

Which way the market swings today? Overall, technical indicators show that currently, the sentiment in the ZEC markets is Bullish. The Fear and Greed Index for ZEC today is in the 28 (Fear) zone.