Zcash (ZEC) surged about 20% over the past 24 hours to trade around $1,000 on Friday, extending a rally that has nearly doubled the privacy token’s price over the past month.
ZEC traded as high as roughly $1,023 after starting the day near $828, according to CoinGecko. Trading volume reached about $1.2 billion over 24 hours, while its market value climbed toward $17 billion.
The move caught traders betting against the token off guard. About $36.6 million of leveraged ZEC positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, with $34.5 million coming from shorts, according to the liquidation data you pulled. A short liquidation happens when a rising price forces an exchange to close a trader’s bearish position because there is no longer enough collateral to keep it open.
That can add fuel to an already rising market because closing a short requires buying the token back. ZEC has gained about 94% over the past 30 days and more than 2,300% over the past year, making it one of the strongest-performing large crypto assets over that stretch.
Open interest in ZEC futures climbed to about 2.3 million ZEC, worth roughly $2.3 billion, as traders piled into derivatives alongside the spot rally.
Among catalysts for the move were both technical and institutional developments in recent weeks.
Grayscale's spot Zcash ETF began trading on NYSE Arca in late August under the ticker ZCSH, converting a trust that had been open only to accredited investors into a fund anyone with a brokerage account can buy.
Separately, Digital Currency Group, which owns Grayscale, was in non-binding talks through a subsidiary to buy 200,000 ZEC, CoinDesk reported at the time.
The network itself has been getting faster. Developers behind Zakura, a Zcash node launched in July, released cryptography tools earlier this month that cut the time a wallet spends building a private transaction from over three seconds to under 200 milliseconds on mobile, part of a push to make the chain fast enough for everyday payments.