Zcash Falls Below $1,000 for First Time Since September

Zcash (ZEC) dropped to $962.85 on Wednesday, falling below $1,000 for the first time since September. According to Cointelegraph, the token’s 13.5% decline over 24 hours, recorded as of 12:20 pm UTC Wednesday, was the steepest among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, while its seven-day loss reached 24.5%. The drop came amid a wider crypto market sell-off, with Bitcoin (BTC) down 5.8% and Ether (ETH) down 11.6% over the same period, according to CoinGecko. Crypto prices fell further Tuesday after US consumer prices rose 0.4% in October from the previous month, exceeding economists’ 0.3% forecast. Zcash supports shielded payments that conceal sender and recipient addresses as well as transaction amounts from public view. The cryptocurrency helped fuel this year’s privacy coin rally, gaining 138% in the 30 days to Sept. 7. It remains the largest privacy coin by market value, representing about 60% of the $28 billion category tracked by CoinGecko, whose total market value fell about 7% over 24 hours. ZEC was trading above $1,370 as recently as Friday, when the network activated its NU7 upgrade. The update reduced the target time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25 seconds to speed up transaction confirmations, and made about 12,224 ZEC in the network’s original privacy pool unspendable. The price decline followed a pledge by Grayscale to contribute $1 million to nonprofits and projects supporting the Zcash network. Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into a US spot exchange-traded fund that began trading on NYSE Arca on Aug. 25. The fund saw about $15 million in net outflows in November through Monday, after recording about $46 million in outflows in October, according to SoSoValue.