The cat may be out of the bag for the dinosaur coin Zcash. In case you've been living under a stone the past decade or so, let me reintroduce you to Zcash.

Zcash, a privacy-focused crypto, was developed by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn with the help of several peer researchers at Johns Hopkins University back in 2016. It was widely heralded early on by cypherpunks and crypto junkies as a real-deal privacy coin to rival Monero.

Using a different protocol than Monero, which focuses on ring signatures and stealth addresses, Zcash uses zero-knowledge proofs and offers shielded address optionality. High-level developers could spend hours talking about the two protocols in connection to crypto money, and also in regard to their uses and applications to cryptography in general.

Early on, there was a lot of buzz around the developer of Zcash. He was hyped up as a real-deal, genius-level coder, and that type of claim piqued a lot of people's attention. One particular rumor floating around was that he encoded and launched the Zcash blockchain on a private jet, or a public airplane. Why, you ask? According to some, this prevents government agencies from recording the noise made when placing the final encryption on a code base. In this case, on the birth of the blockchain and the first block launched.

Confused yet? That's understandable. As if that final keystroke and launch somehow set off a thunderstorm or a siren. Surely whatever noise these final encryptions make could not be louder than the tiniest fraction of a decibel. But many claim the sounds are unique, and that there is government tech gathering them 24/7, 365.

Zcash had a good run early on going into its first bull market, and later had a crack at running up into three-digit figures again around 2021. But then came major FUD, whether deserved or not, from Twitter influencers. Some whale traders and influencers began targeting coins that were in accumulation by Barry Silbert and Grayscale. The FUD was real, and the damage to price was severe and long-lasting. Over the next few years, Zcash came down from the $200s all the way to around $15 by 2024. This drop and lag was also magnified by claims of a government backdoor being coded in at creation, along with 2023 disclosures of node vulnerabilities that could have lowered the cost of attempting a 51% attack, though no such attack was ever observed.

Assumed dead, the coin didn't do much for the next year or so, having just gone through a brutal three-year price bleed. It had some pops and chops at times, but didn't wake up again until recently, when from around $25 a publicly traded company called Leap Therapeutics, a US cancer treatment company, announced a Zcash treasury strategy backed by the Winklevoss twins and Gemini exchange. Around the same time, they changed their name to Cypherpunk Technologies, Inc.

This heavy buying and backing launched Zcash into an almost immediate 10x run, before chopping and crashing down and back up. It has now done the unthinkable and broken the $1,000 mark for the first time in its history.

Before we got here, the coin ran up to around $700 before a security researcher, Taylor Hornby, using Claude, disclosed a soundness flaw in the Orchard shielded pool alongside others during an audit commissioned by Shielded Labs. The bug had actually existed for a few years by this point, and in theory could have allowed double spending, though it seems no exploit ever actually took place. Zcash crashed immensely, from the $600s all the way down to a bottom around $250 in a matter of four or five days, offering traders and investors what may turn out to have been one of the great buys of the century.

The white hat hackers who found the Zcash vulnerability reported it immediately to the Zcash team. They did not steal any coins, and the problem was patched within hours of the announcement. There was very little damage done, and big money whales moved in to take advantage of the flash fire sale.

What's next for price?

This brings us to the main topic of this post: price analysis and projection.

With price currently sitting just above $1,000 a coin, and having recently cleared its past ATH of near $800, we are thoroughly in fresh price discovery mode. When an asset's price goes into price discovery mode, meaning making new highs and exploring where supply and demand sit in uncharted territory, one major thing to watch for is price rejection and blow-off tops.

A blow-off top is basically just that: heavy price rejection. You'll see major long wicks from the upside, often on heavier trading volume. Then typically you'll see subsequent daily candles downward, forming what looks like the top of a skyscraper. That formation in itself isn't ultra unusual, but if it's a significant pullback, perhaps 10% or more in short order, it's often going to be a signal of large holders racing to exit. That's why a blow-off top is almost always bad news.

A blow-off top can only really be countered by a change in available news or a new buy thesis, and/or a blow-off bottom.

The good news is, we have not seen that, and ZEC currently sits above $1,000 as bulls and bears fight a tug of war over the ultra-emotional $1,000 level.

Other types of tops and bottoms

Another type of common top you'll find, in or out of price discovery zones, is distribution and accumulation. For this example we will focus solely on distribution, of which I'll start by saying we have not seen this yet either for ZEC at these levels, although it may be too early to tell.

Distribution looks like chop up and down at a level where minor new highs are made or barely missed before spiking down to a range low. It can mimic Bart Simpson's head and haircut, or be more exaggerated like a Lisa Simpson hairdo. Neither have we seen so far.

What do we go on to gauge upside potential, then? I'll preface by saying that fractals will ruin you. History almost never repeats exactly the same way, but it can indeed rhyme. Although I hate fractals, this does rhyme a lot like early Bitcoin. If I used an old BTC fractal, I may target $1,200 to $1,300 for profit taking. Or I can use things like diagonal trend ranges, which would essentially mean I draw a line. This, although oddly valuable, is typically more helpful over longer periods of time, meaning a channel has been tried and true for years or decades and more traders are watching this imaginary line and selling or buying around their range highs and lows. I will not be using that method here personally.

So what's left? Another popular method, and one I've found to be one of the most historically accurate, is Fibonacci extensions. I could write a whole book on that topic, so I won't get too long-winded on the methodology, however I do suggest researching and learning the ideas and theories behind it.

What I will say is that using Fib extensions, paired with emotional levels, I think more likely is a $1,500 to $1,800 range top. A truly epic run one way or the other. Even if we topped here for now, while still short of 100x, it would truly be an epic run for the dinosaur coin. It would also testify to a longer story still to be written. So the takeaways are that $1,300, $1,500, and then perhaps a bit under $1,800 seem like logical profit-taking zones. Especially if we break sharply higher and every trader and their barber starts calling for $2k.

Looking further down the road, expect volatility to the downside and upside still. Until that volatile trend is thoroughly cooled, expect it to continue in both directions. An interesting fundamental note, which also speaks to a potential Bitcoin fractal thesis, is that max supply mirrors BTC's at 21 million. So treat dips as buy opportunities, and expect bubbles to pop as often as they build.

This article is theoretical and the opinion of a non-professional. It is not financial advice, nor should it be treated as such. Always do your own research and consult professional advisors. Never invest what you are not willing to lose, and stay alert and aware of scams and fraud.