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Spot bitcoin funds gave back most of their week in one session. Net outflows on Thursday, October 22, reached $635.49 million, the largest single day since June 25, erasing about 60% of the $1.08 billion that had come in over the previous three sessions, according to Bitcoin.com News citing SoSoValue. BlackRock's IBIT lost $254.05 million, Fidelity's FBTC $217.46 million, Ark and 21Shares' ARKB $109.43 million, Grayscale's GBTC $29.53 million and Bitwise's BITB $27.35 million, and Morgan Stanley's MSBT was the only fund to add money, at $2.33 million. The reversal was sharp at the top: IBIT and FBTC took in a combined $447.70 million on Wednesday and handed back $471.51 million a day later. Net assets fell by almost $5 billion to $104.71 billion, the week still stands at a net $442.67 million of inflows, and October is now negative at $174.50 million. Ether funds lost $110.50 million, $75.45 million of it from BlackRock's ETHA, while Grayscale's Zcash fund, ZCSH, added $14.23 million, about $29.4 million across two days. Bitcoin sat at $80,493.06 on CoinDesk's front page Saturday, down 1.35%, with ether at $2,360.53, down 1.50%.

Three sessions of buying have taken US spot bitcoin funds to about $1.08 billion of net inflows this week, according to Bitcoin.com News citing SoSoValue: $526.60 million on Monday, $23.16 million on Tuesday and $528.40 million on Wednesday, October 21, spread across eight funds. Wednesday looked different from Monday. BlackRock's IBIT took $234.99 million, but Fidelity's FBTC added $212.71 million after losing money two days earlier, and the pair made up about 84% of the day, with GBTC at $32.59 million, Bitwise's BITB at $19.23 million and ARKB at $9.79 million. Trading value hit $3.15 billion and net assets reached $109.31 billion. Zcash's ZCSH drew $15.18 million, ether funds took a modest $14.96 million despite a $29.32 million outflow from BlackRock's ETHA, and Morgan Stanley's Solana fund broke a 12-session outflow streak. None of it held the rally. CoinDesk showed bitcoin at $82,188.65 on Thursday, down 1.03%, with ether at $2,427.60, down 1.04%, after a run toward $85,000 stalled when Tesla and Meta earnings failed to calm worries about artificial intelligence spending.

Bitcoin briefly reached about $84,739 on Wednesday, October 21, and traded near $84,376 on Bitstamp's hourly chart, after sliding toward $82,200 to $82,600 earlier, according to Bitcoin.com News. The bounce caught traders leaning the wrong way. Coinglass data captured at 11:20 a.m. showed $243.04 million of liquidations over 24 hours, and $188.14 million of that, 77.4%, came from short positions. Bitcoin accounted for $78.42 million, about 94% of it shorts, ether for $47.99 million and Zcash for about $14.80 million. The single largest wipeout was an $8.74 million ether short on Binance, which handled roughly 44% of the total, and 71,223 traders were liquidated in all. Ether climbed to $2,510.18, up 3.22%. The CME FedWatch tool put the odds of no change at the Fed's next meeting at 81%. On the chart, $84,000 to $85,000 is the band to clear, with $86,500 to $86,700 above it, while $82,000 and $80,000 mark the downside. A squeeze driven by forced buying tends to fade unless spot demand follows it.

Zcash's Network Upgrade 7 now has an activation point: block 3,543,405, expected around November 5, according to CoinDesk. Developer Sean Bowe filed the proposal on October 20 as GitHub pull request #1405, ZIP editors, the group that signs off on consensus rule changes, agreed the height at a meeting, and the request carries two approvals. Two steps remained as of 08:00 UTC Wednesday: merging the height into the deployment spec, ZIP-0259, which still listed it as undecided, and shipping node software that includes it. The changes are now fixed in outline. Blocks shorten from 75 seconds to 25, so an exchange waiting for three confirmations goes from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, and 60% of the fees in each block are pulled from circulation and paid out to miners starting around February 2031, with the existing halving schedule kept. Holders have one deadline to note. Sprout, Zcash's original privacy pool, shuts down completely at activation, and any coins still sitting in it become unspendable, so they need to be moved before the upgrade.

Grayscale announced on October 21 that eligible investors can now contribute crypto in exchange for shares in its exchange-traded products, skipping the step of selling for cash first, Bitcoin.com News reported. The program spans bitcoin, ether, XRP, dogecoin, avalanche, chainlink, hyperliquid, solana, sui and zcash. Entry is steep. Approximate minimums as of October 20 run from $364,800 for the Bitcoin Mini Trust and $322,600 for the Zcash ETF, ZCSH, down through $257,000 for the XRP Trust ETF and $232,300 for the Ethereum Staking Mini ETF, to $95,550 for the Dogecoin Trust ETF and $80,300 for the Solana Staking ETF, so the "six-figure" label in early coverage does not hold for every fund. Subscriptions run through the primary market via an authorized participant or an intermediary connected to one, with facilitator fees and other restrictions applying. Grayscale has not spelled out who qualifies as eligible, and the announcement gives no effective date. For a holder sitting on old coins, contributing them in kind instead of selling avoids crystallizing a gain on the way into a fund, though whether that holds up for tax purposes depends on the jurisdiction and is a question for a tax adviser.

US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds took in a net $526.60 million on Monday, October 19, and BlackRock's IBIT alone drew $665.16 million, its largest single day of 2026, according to Bitcoin.com News citing SoSoValue. Fidelity's FBTC lost $83.63 million and Grayscale's GBTC $54.93 million, so the net figure understates how concentrated the buying was. The funds now hold $105.46 billion in net assets after a prior week of $229 million in net outflows. Price barely noticed. CoinDesk showed bitcoin at $81,440.69 on Tuesday, down 1.11%, with ether at $2,383.87, down 1.67%, as South Korea's Kospi fell 3.7% on renewed worries about artificial intelligence spending and Brent crude topped $111. Elsewhere in the fund data the picture stayed weak. Ether funds shed $103.28 million, $95.40 million of it from BlackRock's ETHA, Solana funds posted an 11th straight day of outflows at $6.72 million, and Grayscale's Zcash fund, ZCSH, lost $10.45 million. Bitwise's NEAR fund was the lone gainer outside bitcoin at $5.42 million. A half-billion-dollar day absorbed without a rally suggests sellers were matching it somewhere else.

October 20 is the day Zcash developers were due to decide whether Network Upgrade 7 goes to mainnet and at what block height, and no outcome had been announced as of Tuesday morning, according to 24/7 Wall St. Engineers are targeting November 5 for activation but may push it back if testing turns up problems; the upgrade has run on testnet since October 4 at block 4,465,026. The block time question we left open on October 14 now has a clear answer: the target drops from 75 seconds to 25, roughly tripling confirmation speed, with the block subsidy cut by three and halving intervals stretched by the same factor so daily issuance stays level. The fee change is the bigger shift for miners. NU7 would hold back 60% of transaction fees until a February 2031 release, leaving miners the other 40%, though the developers have not said how much ZEC that withholds per day, and subsidies, not fees, still drive most new supply. Holders backed both rules in a coinholder vote in which about 2.4 million ZEC, roughly 66% of the eligible pool, took part: 98.9% supported keeping the halving schedule and 96.6% the 2031 release date. ZEC traded near $1,135, down 7.3% on the week, 21.5% on the month and 64.5% below its record, while Grayscale's ZCSH lost $10.45 million on Monday per SoSoValue data reported by Bitcoin.com News.

Network Upgrade 7 activated on the Zcash public testnet at block 4,465,026, mined at 18:21:45 UTC on October 4, and the final go or no-go call on mainnet deployment is set for October 20, with November 5 as the target activation date. The headline change is the target block interval, which most reporting puts at a cut from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Worth flagging that the coverage is not unanimous on the direction of that change, with at least one outlet describing longer block times while contradicting itself later in the same piece, and KuCoin's roundup notes the Zcash Foundation had not clarified it at the time of writing. We are treating 75 to 25 as the likely figure rather than a settled one, and the NU7 specification is where it gets confirmed. Either way this is a consensus-level parameter, which means node operators and miners have to adopt it rather than opt in gradually, and a change to how often blocks arrive touches per-block reward accounting and confirmation assumptions across every service that quotes a number of confirmations.

CoinMarketCap's Zcash page had ZEC at $1,240.43 as of 01:55 UTC on October 14, roughly 26% below the September 26 closing peak of $1,653, after an 8.5% drop on October 12 that came with about $19.9 million in leveraged liquidations and general caution ahead of the US inflation print. The flow picture turned first. Grayscale's Zcash ETF, ticker ZCSH, took $93.6 million of net outflows in the week BeInCrypto reported on October 3, its first negative week since the August 25 launch and enough to erase roughly 30% of everything it had gathered, having led all crypto ETFs with $98.2 million of inflows two weeks earlier. Against that, Winklevoss Asset Services filed an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 6 for a spot Zcash ETF proposed for Nasdaq under the ticker WINK, with Gemini as custodian. A second vehicle arriving while the first one bleeds is the more interesting datapoint than the price, because it says issuers are still competing for a product whose existing demand just reversed.

The Zcash development team is planning quantum-resistant signature opcodes built on hash-based signature verification, with integration targeted for January 2027 and no activation date set. Zakura engineer Roman Akhtariev describes the mechanism as preventing an attacker from "deriving private keys from public keys and forging transaction authorizations." The number that explains why this matters: roughly 11.96 million ZEC sit in transparent address pools out of 16.98 million in circulation, about 70% of supply, and transparent addresses are the ones whose public keys are exposed. Shielded balances are a different problem with a different exposure. Worth keeping the urgency honest, though, since no practical quantum attack on mainstream wallet keys has been demonstrated. This is work done ahead of a threat rather than in response to one, which is the only sensible time to do it.

Bitget increased its estimate from $351.6 million to about $387.5 million after tracing stolen assets on Zcash and TRON that the first review missed, across seven networks. The exchange attributes the breach to suspected North Korean actors. Elliptic says the theft pushes North Korea's 2026 crypto haul past $1 billion, with laundering already running through Tornado Cash. CEO Gracy Chen has been consistent that no private key was compromised: attackers broke into a backend wallet system, fed it forged transfer data, and let Bitget's own authorization process approve the payouts. Cold wallets were untouched.

Crypto climbed alongside equity futures Monday as Brent crude fell for a fourth straight session, easing the energy-driven inflation pressure that had weighed on risk assets through the Iran conflict. Traders are positioning ahead of a Trump-Xi summit later this week. Monero's XMR was the standout among majors, up 13%, extending the privacy trade that has carried Zcash to ten-year highs this month.

ZEC traded between roughly $1,435 and $1,585 Saturday, up about 5% on the day and 32% to 37% on the week depending on the reference point, with market cap near $26 billion at rank nine. Circulating supply is 16,876,334 of the 21 million cap, with daily issuance around 1,800 ZEC or roughly 3.9% annually. The year puts the move in context: ZEC opened 2026 near $525, fell to about $190 at the yearly low, and has now broken clear of the $1,000 to $1,250 supply zone that capped earlier attempts.

Grayscale announced a three-for-one split of its Zcash spot ETF, tripling the share count and cutting the per-share price, a housekeeping move that makes the fund accessible to smaller accounts after ZEC's run. The fund has logged a three-week inflow streak exceeding $358 million since listing in late August. Splits do not change what a holder owns, but they do change who can comfortably buy in, which is the point when a single share gets expensive.

ZEC pushed above $1,500 Friday, hitting an intraday high near $1,526, up more than 10% on the day and roughly 46% on the week. That extends a climb from about $470 in mid-August, a gain near 215% in a month, and lifts market cap to around $25 billion at rank nine. Most coverage is calling this an all-time high, which is wrong: Zcash traded at $3,191.93 in 2016, so this is a ten-year high rather than a record. Circulating supply sits at 16.94 million against the 21 million cap.

Zcash developers set November 5 as the mainnet target for the NU7 upgrade after reaching unanimous agreement across the Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar Group, ZODL and Shielded Labs. The headline change cuts block target spacing from 75 seconds to 25. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC participated in the governance vote, with 99.9% backing faster blocks and 98.9% voting to preserve the existing Bitcoin-style halving schedule. Testnet activation comes in October, with the final mainnet activation height decided October 20.

Grayscale's spot Zcash ETF, which listed August 25, has reportedly surpassed $500 million in assets under management by mid-September. Paradigm founder Matt Huang disclosed ZEC holdings and an investment in the ZODL wallet, and Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl argued Zcash could reach 10% market share relative to Bitcoin within five years, the basis for the firm's much-quoted $8,100 target. Treat that number as a house view rather than a forecast. Arthur Hayes added to the noise by publicly asking whether he should buy the top.

Futures open interest climbed to 2.3 million ZEC Thursday from 1.76 million the day before, the lowest since August 10, which points to retail piling in. The more interesting reading is the open-interest-weighted funding rate, negative for close to two days, meaning longs are not paying a premium to hold despite the vertical move. RSI at 71 is overbought while MACD stays positive. Support sits at $1,400 and $1,200 with structural support at $1,005, and there is no overhead resistance on the daily chart because the price has never been here in a decade.

Bitcoin spiked to $76,499.99 five minutes after the Fed release Wednesday and gave the entire move back within half an hour, and now trades below $76,000 at a three-and-a-half-week low. The median policymaker projection moved to 4.1% at end-2026 against 3.8% in June, which is the part that keeps working against risk assets. The contrast with Zcash is stark: the privacy token is up roughly 130% over 30 days while Bitcoin has spent the same period grinding lower.

ZEC pushed above $1,200, extending a run that has taken it from roughly $40 a year ago through the Grayscale ZCSH listing in late August and past $1,000 earlier this month. Separately, Jack Dorsey filed for a Bitcoin bank, a structural development worth watching given his Block and Square infrastructure already touches merchant payments. Both items land in a week where Bitcoin itself went nowhere.

ZEC traded near $1,018 Saturday morning, up 28% on the week and 7.9% against Bitcoin, inside a 24-hour range of $949.54 to $1,046.30 on roughly $1.28 billion of volume. Market cap sits near $17.14 billion, putting a privacy coin in the top eleven, a position the category has rarely held. The scale of the run is the striking part: up about 94% in a month and more than 2,000% on the year, from roughly $40 twelve months ago and near $200 as recently as March.

Friday's record push to $1,023 triggered a rush of hashpower, briefly sending network solrate past 30 GSol/s for the first time, according to The Block. The catch is that miner revenue came in about 3% lower than when ZEC traded below $900, because the new competition arrived faster than rewards could keep pace. Falling profitability during a price rally is an unusual combination, and it is worth watching for what it means for network security incentives if it persists.

ZEC jumped 20% to briefly trade above $1,020, clearing the landmark $1,000 level and forcing $34 million in leveraged short positions out of the market. Dash gained 19% alongside it as privacy coins led a broad rally. The move extends a run that has been building since Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash trust into a spot ETF, and it is now the strongest sustained bid in the sector.

Grayscale converted its roughly $304 million Zcash Trust into an exchange-traded fund under the ticker ZCSH on NYSE Arca, with Coinbase Custody holding the underlying coins. It is the first US-listed spot ETF offering direct exposure to a privacy coin, which is the detail that matters, since privacy assets have been the category regulators were expected to treat least favorably. The listing gives brokerage-account investors a regulated route to ZEC without touching the token, and it has anchored the rally that followed.

ZEC pushed to $858.62 before sellers left a large upper wick, pulling it back toward $760 and then settling near $797 while holding above $680. The odd part is the silence around it: social mentions peaked at just 138 on August 21, roughly 88% below the 1,116 recorded before June's bottom. Trading participation expanded far faster than public discussion, which is an unusual signature for a move this size and suggests it has been driven by positioning rather than retail attention.

ZEC broke above $814 to reach $855, its highest since January 2018, as Grayscale filed the last amended registration to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot ETF trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH. An earlier amendment disclosed that a DCG subsidiary is in nonbinding talks to contribute roughly 200,000 ZEC, about $110 million, to the fund. The word nonbinding is doing real work there, since the transaction could shrink or never happen at all.