Zcash slides over 40% as spot selling drives 44% drop; futures open interest hits record

Zcash (ZEC) fell more than 40% over 24 hours, with market-structure data pointing to spot selling rather than a leverage-driven cascade, according to CoinDesk. ZEC saw about $118 million in forced liquidations even as the token nearly halved, while bitcoin and ether fell only a few percent but liquidated $335 million and $278 million, respectively. Traders opened positions into the decline at the fastest pace on record, suggesting heavy new short interest, and ZEC open interest hit a record high on Thursday. Earlier, Shielded Labs disclosed a critical vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard privacy pool that could have enabled undetected creation of unlimited counterfeit ZEC, discovered with help from Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model.