Several INDEPENDENT estimates of what ZEC’s market cap would be if an observable activity measure were priced the way it is priced elsewhere — against the actual figure (dashed).
Toggle between market cap and price per ZEC; the axis is LOGARITHMIC in both, so a gentle-looking slope is exponential growth and each gridline is 10× the one below. The point is the SPREAD, not any one line: each asks the same question of a different market, and the disagreement is the honest content.
• BTC market cap @ equal issuance is the crudest line and is here as the baseline — it asks nothing about activity, only what Bitcoin was worth when it had mined as many coins as Zcash has now.
Every other issuance-aligned method is derived from that same alignment, so the gap between them shows how much of an estimate is the supply schedule and how much is the activity being measured.
• On-chain volume @ equal issuance: ZEC’s on-chain volume priced at the market-cap-per-dollar-of-volume BTC had at that point.
• Transactions @ equal issuance: the same alignment counting TRANSACTIONS rather than value — independent because volume can be one whale while transaction count is closer to how many distinct people use the chain.
• Perp volume and
• Perp open interest: ZEC’s Hyperliquid traded notional and standing position, each priced at BTC’s equivalent per dollar of market cap; both have short history, since Hyperliquid is only snapshotted from mid-2026. Two measures are deliberately EXCLUDED.
Funding rate is a rate reflecting leverage positioning and cost of carry: it says which side is crowded, not how large the asset is. NEAR Intents swap volume was tried and dropped. ZEC does about 179,000 of swap volume per $B of market cap there, against BTC’s 446.
That implied a market cap larger than all of crypto. The 400x gap is real. But it measures how concentrated ZEC trading is on one venue, not value. These are relative-activity measures, not valuations or price targets.
Each line asks the same question of a different market: if this observable measure of Zcash activity were priced the way that market prices its own, what market cap would that imply? The dashed line is the actual figure. None of them is a prediction, and none is a valuation. They are the arithmetic of a comparison. The comparison is only as good as its assumption: that two networks should be priced alike.
The spread is the content. A single line saying “implied cap is 4× today’s” would be a number to quote; five lines disagreeing by an order of magnitude is the honest picture, because the disagreement is what the estimates actually support. If they agreed, that would be worth noticing. They do not.
The axis is logarithmic. Each gridline is 10× the one below, so a gentle-looking slope is exponential and a small vertical gap is a large multiple. Read distances as ratios here, never as differences.
For the figure that needs no assumption, see market cap; for what the coins actually last cost, realized price.