From Cointelegraph · By Zoltan Vardai
Zcash (ZEC) fell to a two-month low of $962.85 on Wednesday, a day after Grayscale pledged $1 million to nonprofits and projects supporting the Zcash network.
As of 12:20 pm UTC Wednesday, Zcash’s 13.5% drop led 24-hour losses among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and was down 24.5% over seven days. The decline was part of a broader crypto sell-off that left 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, above economists’ 0.3% forecast.
Zcash lets users send shielded payments that keep sender and recipient addresses and transaction amounts out of public view.
Zcash helped drive this year’s rally in privacy coins, gaining 138% in the 30 days to Sept. 7. It remains the largest privacy coin by market value, accounting for about 60% of the $28 billion category tracked by CoinGecko. The category’s combined market value fell about 7% over 24 hours.
ZEC traded above $1,370 as recently as Friday, when Zcash activated its NU7 upgrade. The upgrade cut the target time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25 to speed up transaction confirmations. It also made about 12,224 ZEC held in the network’s original privacy pool unspendable.
Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into a US spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) that began trading on NYSE Arca on Aug. 25. The fund recorded about $15 million in net outflows in November through Monday, following about $46 million in October, according to SoSoValue.
Related: Zcash devs propose another block time cut days after NU7 upgrade