Zcash drops under $1,000 for the first time in more than two months

Zcash (ZEC), the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrency by market value in CoinGecko's ranking, fell below $1,000 on November 11 for the first time since early September. CoinGecko's hourly price data shows Zcash first under that level at 07:00 UTC, and Cointelegraph reported a low of $962.85.

How far the Zcash price has fallen

In CoinGecko's hourly series, Zcash stood at $1,367.82 at 17:00 UTC on November 6, its highest reading of the month, and reached an hourly low of $970.41 at 09:00 UTC on November 11, a fall of about 29% in less than five days. Hourly readings do not capture every trade, so the price can dip lower between two of them; Cointelegraph did not name the source of its lower figure. The last hourly reading under $1,000 before that was $986.65 on September 4. Zcash was down 13.5% over 24 hours at 12:20 UTC, according to Cointelegraph, and was back at about $1,008 at 17:02 UTC, CoinGecko's data shows.

Most of the drop came on November 10: the hourly price went from $1,149.74 at 12:00 UTC to $1,012.71 at 17:00 UTC that day. Over seven days Zcash was down 24.5%, against 5.8% for Bitcoin and 11.6% for ether, Cointelegraph reported, citing CoinGecko. Bitcoin was up about 1.8% over 24 hours at 17:02 UTC on November 11, CoinGecko's data shows.

The Grayscale pledge and the NU7 upgrade

Grayscale, which manages crypto investment products, pledged $1 million on November 10 to nonprofits and projects that support the Zcash network, according to Cointelegraph. We could not open Grayscale's own announcement. The outlet also reported that Zcash traded above $1,370 as recently as November 6, around the time a network upgrade known as NU7 activated, and that Zcash accounts for about 60% of the roughly $28 billion privacy-coin category tracked by CoinGecko. The upgrade took effect at block 3,543,405 and cut the target time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25, The Block reported.

None of the sources we read establishes why the price fell. We have not seen a statement from Zcash's developers about the move.

Why it matters

Zcash is a cryptocurrency that lets users hide the sender, recipient and amount of a transaction. At its hourly low on November 11 it was about 42% below the $1,680.73 it reached on September 26, the highest reading in 90 days of CoinGecko's hourly data, and the fall came less than a week after a network upgrade. The fall came three days after Bitcoin fell to its lowest level since August, and US Bitcoin funds have had about $1.6 billion of outflows in November, according to data cited by Cointelegraph.

What it could mean for traders

In our assessment, round numbers such as $1,000 matter mainly because many traders place orders around them, which can speed a move in either direction once the level breaks. Nothing in the data we read shows whether the fall will continue or reverse.