Arthur Hayes has put Zcash at the center of his investment thesis. In an interview with Unchained founder Laura Shin, the BitMEX co-founder said ZEC is now "probably my largest position outside of Bitcoin." Hayes framed the trade as a bet on rising demand for financial privacy as AI, Big Tech, and governments make public-chain activity easier to analyze.
Hayes said he views Zcash as the strongest privacy asset in crypto. He acknowledged the debate between Zcash, Monero, and other privacy coins remains unsettled but said his view was shaped by reading competing arguments and speaking with developers working directly on privacy systems. "I think Zcash is the best," he said.
According to Hayes, Bitcoin's transparent ledger still has advantages for accountability, but transparency comes with a growing trade-off as surveillance tools improve. "With AI, big tech and big government, it's very trivial to de-anonymize transactions," he said.
That creates room for a separate privacy asset like Zcash to accrue value alongside Bitcoin. Hayes described Zcash and Monero as trading at very low relative values versus BTC and called the setup asymmetric if privacy demand becomes more obvious to investors. The catalyst, he believes, is the exponential improvement of AI systems that can link activity across public data sets.
In his latest Crypto Trader Digest essay titled "The Butterfly Touch," Hayes extended the thesis. He argued that rising dollar and yuan liquidity, driven by AI infrastructure spending, geopolitical conflict, and renewed credit creation, has reopened the risk-on window for crypto markets. He said Bitcoin bottomed earlier this year at $60,000 and argued that a move back to $126,000 is a "foregone conclusion" if fiat liquidity keeps expanding.
The essay's altcoin section was more explicit. Hayes wrote that it is "time to shitcoin," revealing that Hyperliquid and Zcash are already large enough positions for his fund, Maelstrom, while NEAR is his "next favorite" trade. He said his next essay would lay out why the privacy narrative combined with Near Intents could create a "positive cash flow situation" for the protocol.
That framing links Zcash and NEAR under a broader privacy-and-utility thesis. Zcash represents Hayes' preferred pure-play privacy exposure, while NEAR appears to be the next asset he wants to connect to that theme through intent-based execution and potential protocol-level cash flow.
At press time, Zcash traded at $541.75.