Cypherpunk Technologies CIO Will McEvoy is making a blunt case for Zcash: the market is undervaluing ZEC because it still has no coherent way to price privacy. In a thread published Tuesday, McEvoy argued that the discount is especially striking as AI-driven surveillance expands and demand for financial confidentiality becomes easier to justify.
Why Zcash Could Be ‘Mispriced’He built that argument around relative size. At the time of his post, McEvoy put ZEC at $263 with a $4.4 billion market capitalization. Against that, he listed Bitcoin at $1.45 trillion, gold at $34.8 trillion, offshore wealth at $11.3 trillion, stablecoins at $312 billion, and Monero at $6.8 billion. The point was less about direct comparability than scale: by McEvoy’s framing, Zcash remains “just a rounding error” in every market it could plausibly intersect.
The offshore wealth comparison is more pointed. McEvoy described privacy not as a niche preference, but as something people have historically paid for at scale. “There is $11.3 trillion in offshore wealth,” he wrote. “People pay a premium for privacy. They always have. They always will.” From there, he argued that if Zcash captured 0.1% of that market, the implied price would be $680. At 0.5%, it would be $3,402, and at 1%, $6,804. “Zcash is a Swiss bank account in your pocket,” he added.
He also compared Zcash to Monero. McEvoy argued Zcash offers “stronger cryptography, optional transparency for compliance, and better scalability,” then laid out a simple relative-value table: parity with Monero would imply $410 for ZEC, double Monero’s value would imply $819, and five times Monero’s value would imply $2,047. “The privacy coin throne is not yet claimed,” he wrote.
His closing point tied the whole thesis to a broader technological shift. “Artificial intelligence is the attack. Zcash is the defense,” McEvoy said. “AI decodes all the data. Zcash encrypts all the data. AI is the surveillance state. Zcash is the sovereign individual. As AI advances, privacy becomes more valuable, not less.”
At press time, ZEC traded at $244.77.
