Zcash Is the Most Mispriced Asset in Crypto, Claims Cypherpunk CIO

TL;DR

• McEvoy argued Zcash is deeply undervalued because crypto still lacks a credible framework for pricing privacy as AI-driven surveillance expands across financial systems.
• He compared $ZEC with Bitcoin, gold, offshore wealth, stablecoins and Monero, producing rerating scenarios that point to materially higher possible prices across several benchmarks.
• At press time, $ZEC traded at $244.77, far below the valuation ranges McEvoy believes rising demand for privacy could ultimately support in markets.

Zcash is back in the spotlight, not because of a sudden breakout, but because one fund executive says the market may be misunderstanding what it is worth. Will McEvoy’s argument starts with a simple provocation: privacy still has no proper price. In a thread, the Cypherpunk Technologies CIO argued that $ZEC is being undervalued because crypto still lacks a coherent framework for pricing financial confidentiality, even as AI-driven surveillance expands. By his framing, the disconnect is striking precisely because the need for privacy becomes easier to defend as digital monitoring grows more sophisticated.

Zcash is the most mispriced asset in crypto because privacy is the most mispriced asset in society.

The market has no real framework for valuing privacy so it gets ignored.

The upside is asymmetric nonetheless.

Some food for thought:

— Will McEvoy (@will__mcevoy) March 18, 2026

Why the Valuation Case for Zcash Looks So Radical

McEvoy built the thesis around scale rather than immediate comparability. His core point is that Zcash still looks tiny beside every market it could conceivably touch. At the time of his post, he put $ZEC at $263 with a market capitalization of $4.4 billion, then stacked that against 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. From there, he laid out rerating scenarios that imply sharp upside if privacy begins to command a premium in digital markets that investors routinely overlook.

The valuation ladders were where the argument became unusually aggressive. McEvoy’s upside case treats Zcash as a digital privacy instrument with several possible comparables, not just one. Relative to Bitcoin, he said $ZEC would reach about $446 at 0.5% of BTC’s value, $891 at 1%, $1,782 at 2%, and $4,456 at 5%. Against offshore wealth, his table pointed to $680 at 0.1%, $3,402 at 0.5%, and $6,804 at 1%. He also mapped gold-based scenarios up to $10,477, stablecoin scenarios up to $4,692, and Monero-relative targets as high as $2,047. Each benchmark reinforced the same message.

The larger message was less about charts than about the direction of technology itself. For McEvoy, AI-driven surveillance is what turns Zcash from a niche privacy coin into a broader hedge against visibility. He argued that stablecoin transfers are tracked, wallets are surveilled, and privacy should become more valuable, not less, as artificial intelligence grows more capable of decoding data. That framing gives the thesis a political edge as well as a valuation one. At press time, however, $ZEC traded at $244.77, leaving the market well below the scenarios he believes could justify a rerating.