Dan Held, former Head of Marketing at Kraken exchange, has shared how major Bitcoin whale investors were urging him to buy Zcash long before the ZEC price surpassed $1,000 for the first time in over a decade. According to Held, who bought his first Bitcoin back in 2012, investors with capital ranging from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars had been advising him for approximately three to six months. The recommended buy range was $100 to $400 per ZEC coin. Many of these investors, who have been trading Bitcoin since 2013, funded the trade by selling between one-fifth and one-eighth of their long-term Bitcoin portfolios.
Last week, Zcash broke through the psychological $1,000 level, supported by inflows through the Grayscale ZCSH Zcash ETF fund, which accelerated the token's price rally. Over the past three months, the asset has gained 182%. Held, however, remains skeptical about ZEC's rapid rise. He compared the coin to Bitcoin, noting that while the Zcash community has found a balance between privacy and the ability to verify the supply volume, Bitcoin allows no such compromise. Held also pointed to the issue of uncertainty – the confusion surrounding a possible vulnerability made it difficult to understand how many ZEC coins are actually circulating on the market. For an asset positioned as "digital gold," such ambiguity is unacceptable.
Held acknowledged that in the crypto industry, popular narratives about assets typically emerge after a strong price move, not before it begins. In his view, the best trades are made when nobody wants an asset – as was the case with Bitcoin and SpaceX. For Zcash, however, that moment appears to have already passed. Some traders who had bet on the token's decline lost money during the bull rally, and sentiment quickly reversed. Whether the Bitcoin whales who bet on buying were right will only be revealed over a full market cycle.