Monero Jumps on $23 Million Mystery Buy as Zcash Rally Cools

Zcash (ZEC) fell by over 6% in the past 24 hours to $520.05 as traders booked profits on a multi-month rally. Meanwhile, Monero (XMR) climbed 11% to $396.75 after an unexplained $23 million on-chain purchase.

The divergence has reopened a long-running debate over which privacy coin offers the stronger product.

Capital appears to be rotating from ZEC’s institutional narrative back toward XMR’s default-privacy design.

Zcash Cools After 56% Monthly Surge

ZEC trades near $520 after touching highs above $640 earlier in May, a level it last visited in 2017. The token is still up almost 57% over the past 30 days and more than 900% year-on-year.

The recent climb followed:

• A January decision by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to close its probe into the Zcash Foundation without enforcement action,
• A May position disclosure by Multicoin Capital, and
• Grayscale’s filing to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot ETF.

The Grayscale spot ETF filing added an institutional layer to the rally.

Roughly 30% of total ZEC supply now sits inside the network’s shielded pools, tightening effective float.

The current pullback brings the token back toward its 200-day moving average near $500, a level flagged as a key line for the next leg.

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Monero Rally Tied to Unexplained $23 Million Buy

XMR’s move accelerated after a sequence of transfers in which a single wallet withdrew $29.3 million in USDC from Coinbase, swapped portions into DAI, and then routed roughly $23 million into XMR through the Wagyu over-the-counter venue.

…someone withdrew $29.3M USDC from Coinbase and started swapping it into DAI (likely hacked or phished funds). Yesterday, they began swapping the DAI back into USDC and then swapped the USDC into XMR through Wagyu(.)xyz using multiple wallets. Between 17 and 4 hours ago, they purchased $23M worth of $XMR, pushing the price up nearly 15% in the process,” revealed on-chain analyst MLM in a post.

No public hack or theft has been confirmed as the origin of the funds, and the speculation that the flow came from compromised wallets remains unverified.

The incident mirrors earlier instances in which large opaque buys into XMR triggered short-term rallies.

Rotation Inside the Privacy Coin Sector

XMR’s RingCT signatures and stealth addresses apply privacy to every transaction by default.

Zcash uses zk-SNARK technology, but only when users opt into shielded transactions.

Critics have used this difference to question the ZEC rally each time the sector reprices.

The privacy basket has been one of 2026’s strongest crypto themes, building on returns from a year in which privacy tokens outperformed majors.

XMR’s market capitalization now stands at roughly $7.43 billion against ZEC’s $8.67 billion, leaving the two assets two ranks apart at 16 and 18 on the CoinGecko table.

The renewed gap also reflects long-standing community arguments about Zcash versus Monero design for users who treat untraceability as a baseline rather than an option.

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