Zcash price and where to buy ZEC

What is Zcash?

Zcash is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency built on Bitcoin’s design with one major addition: shielded transactions, which use zero-knowledge proofs to hide the sender, receiver and amount while still proving the transaction is valid. Transparent transactions, visible like Bitcoin’s, are also possible. Supply is capped at 21 million ZEC and the block reward halves roughly every four years.

How to buy Zcash, step by step

1. Pick an exchange. ZEC is listed on four of the five exchanges we track. Compare fees, funding options and whether it serves your country in our exchange reviews.
2. Create and verify your account. Regulated exchanges ask for identity documents before you can deposit fiat.
3. Fund the account. A bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit usually costs far less than a card payment.
4. Buy ZEC. Use the ZEC/USDT or ZEC/USD market, and check the cheapest venue in the table above first.
5. Decide where to keep it. On the exchange is simplest, but the exchange then holds your coins. Exchanges usually support only transparent Zcash addresses; to use shielded transactions, withdraw to a wallet you control that supports them.

Where to buy Zcash at the best price

The cheapest venue right now is marked in the table above. Add its trading fee before comparing: on ZEC the venues disagree by about 0.062 percent on average, so on a small purchase the fee and the funding method usually matter more.

• The price on that venue. Each row shows the gap to our composite.
• The trading fee. Our fee comparison lists spot fees side by side.
• How you fund the account. A bank transfer or stablecoin deposit is usually far cheaper than a card payment, which often costs several percent.

Why the Zcash price differs between exchanges

In our minute-by-minute measurement the gap between the highest and lowest venue averaged about 0.062 percent, against about 0.025 percent for Bitcoin. It went above half a percent in about three minutes out of every thousand, and reached about 1.35 percent at its widest.

About two thirds of the ZEC spot volume we track trades on a single venue. The spread figure at the top of this page is the live measurement; our guide on why crypto prices differ between exchanges explains the mechanism.

What moves the Zcash price

The wider crypto market, and in ZEC’s case its own news too. In our hourly composite, ZEC moved with Bitcoin at a correlation of about 0.45, where 1 would mean identical moves, and its moves were about three and a half times the size of Bitcoin’s.

Zcash’s link to Bitcoin was weak in our data, so its own news matters: demand for privacy, exchange listings and delistings of privacy coins, and leverage. The funding rates on this page show whether leveraged traders are paying to be long or short right now.

Pros and cons of Zcash

Pros

• Optional shielded transactions for private payments.
• Bitcoin’s 21 million cap and halving schedule.
• Its gap between exchanges rarely spiked in our measurement.

Cons

• Some exchanges and jurisdictions restrict privacy coins, which can limit where you can trade it.
• Its hourly moves were about three and a half times Bitcoin’s in our data.
• It trades on four of the five exchanges we track, not all of them.

Zcash’s highest price

Zcash’s all-time high is about $3,192 on volume-weighted data, set in its first days of trading, while a single exchange printed about $5,942 at the same time: one of the clearest examples of one venue’s price not being the market’s. The chart above shows the last 30 days of our composite, and the ZEC to USD converter applies the live price to any amount.