Zcash at $245 was the asymmetric bet Will McEvoy was willing to put $50 million behind. In November 2025, his firm Cypherpunk Technologies bought 203,775 ZEC. The bet has already paid off. Here is what drove that call and why it matters.
Who Is Will McEvoy?
McEvoy wears two hats. He is a principal at Winklevoss Capital and the newly appointed CIO at Cypherpunk Technologies. The Winklevoss name you probably know from Gemini, the crypto exchange. Cypherpunk closed a $58.88 million raise with Winklevoss leading the round, then dropped its old biotech identity entirely to go all-in on Zcash. McEvoy was brought in to run that strategy from day one.
Also Read: Cypherpunk Zcash Purchase Adds $29M to Crypto Treasury
The Zcash Asymmetric Bet Explained
McEvoy’s argument is not complicated. The world keeps moving toward surveillance. Financial privacy, meanwhile, is not something most crypto assets actually offer. Zcash does. And nobody was paying for that feature at $245.
Zcash also has a 21 million coin supply cap. Same as Bitcoin. So you get a scarce asset with genuine privacy tech, sitting at a price that ignored both of those things. That is the gap McEvoy walked through.
By mid-November 2025, ZEC had crossed $500. It hit $720 not long after. The entry at $245 aged well fast.
Cypherpunk also set a target of owning at least 5% of total ZEC supply. Their initial 203,775 coins put them at around 1.25% of circulating supply. They kept buying.
Why Zcash and Not Bitcoin or Monero?
Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does, but privacy is not on that list. Every transaction is on a public ledger. Monero solves that, but it keeps running into problems with exchanges. Coinbase, Kraken, Binance have all dropped it at various points due to regulatory pressure. That limits who can actually buy and hold it.
Zcash takes a different path. You can transact publicly or shield a transaction using zk-SNARKs. That flexibility is exactly what regulators want to see. Tyler Winklevoss described ZEC as “encrypted bitcoin,” which is a clean way to put it. Same scarcity model, actual privacy built in.
Also Read: What is ZEC and Why Is ZCASH Pumping?
The MicroStrategy Playbook, Privacy Edition
If this structure feels familiar, it should. Cypherpunk is running the same playbook MicroStrategy used with Bitcoin. Raise institutional money, stack a scarce asset, hold through the noise. What McEvoy adds is a harder edge to the thesis.
He told investors directly: “The world is nearing peak surveillance. This is the least private moment in human history. Betting on Zcash is betting on a return to the norm.” That is not boilerplate. That is a worldview, and it gives long-term holders something to hold onto when the price gets ugly.
Where the Position Stands Now
Cypherpunk did not stop at the initial buy. By late December 2025, they had added more ZEC at around $514 per token, pushing total holdings past 290,062 coins and the blended cost basis to roughly $334. ZEC was sitting above $536 at that point, market cap in the $8 to $9 billion range. Grayscale’s Zcash Trust was also sitting on around $137 million in ZEC around the same period. The institutional stack is real.
The Risks
None of this is clean. Privacy coins sit in a grey area that regulators keep circling. Some countries have already moved against ZEC. And unlike Bitcoin, ZEC does not have the same depth of buyers ready to catch a falling price. When it drops, it can drop hard and fast. ZEC peaked near $720 then pulled back sharply before finding its feet. If you are considering a position, size for the possibility that this thing cuts in half before it doubles again.
Also Read:
What is the Zcash asymmetric bet Will McEvoy described?
Cypherpunk put $50 million into 203,775 ZEC at $245 each. McEvoy’s view was that the privacy use case was being completely ignored by the market at that price, while the supply cap and tech fundamentals justified a much higher valuation.
Is Cypherpunk Technologies a public company?
Yes. After rebranding from Leap Therapeutics in November 2025, the company listed on Nasdaq under the ticker CYPH and shifted its entire business model to building a Zcash treasury.
Why did they pick Zcash over Monero?
Monero’s exchange delistings are a real problem for adoption. Zcash gives users the choice between public and private transactions, which makes it easier for regulated platforms to list and support it.
What should investors watch out for with ZEC?
Regulatory moves against privacy coins are the biggest unknown. Beyond that, ZEC trades in thinner markets than Bitcoin, so price swings go further in both directions. This is not a conservative position by any measure.
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Disclaimer:
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