Privacy-focused Bitcoin alternative Zcash went on a tear Friday, surging some 33% in a matter of hours and triggering over $51 million in short position liquidations.

The token surged to nearly $735 Friday afternoon, up from $536 just a day earlier. It has since settled to $666 as of this writing, still up 25% over the past day.

That rapid price action made Zcash-related positions the third-most liquidated in crypto on Friday, behind only dominant mainstays Bitcoin and Ethereum. Over $59 million worth of Zcash positions have been liquidated, including longs, per data from CoinGlass, compared to $150 million in liquidations for BTC and $146 million for ETH.



Zcash, until recently a fairly obscure cryptocurrency, has been on a near-nonstop streak for over a month. The token, which had hovered around $40 for over three years, began pumping in early October and hasn’t let up since. In just five weeks, its price has ballooned by a factor of 10.

According to data from CoinGecko, Friday's peak was the highest price registered since January 2018. Even so, at its current price, Zcash remains 79% below the all-time high mark of $3,191 set back in 2016.

Analysts have argued in recent weeks that Zcash’s recent rally is thanks in large part to growing anxieties about Bitcoin’s privacy and decentralization in a moment of unprecedented corporate and political embrace of the world’s top cryptocurrency. 

Zcash, created in 2016 via a fork of Bitcoin’s codebase, encourages anonymous transactions with a system of zero-knowledge proofs. It is the largest privacy focused crypto token by market capitalization, with a current valuation of about $11 billion.

Though Zcash has consistently climbed in price for the last several weeks, today’s surge could have been at least in part influenced by the outcome of a closely watched trial in the United States pertaining to privacy and crypto software development. 

On Thursday, Keonne Rodriguez, a developer of the privacy-focused Bitcoin app Samourai Wallet, was sentenced to five years in federal prison, after he pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitter. 

That sentence—the maximum possible Rodriguez could have received—was requested by President Trump's Department of Justice, which has in other contexts pledged to protect the rights of crypto developers.

The decision was roundly criticized by leading crypto and privacy advocates.

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