Monero retakes privacy crown as Zcash turmoil rattles rally

Monero climbed back toward its all-time high levels, reclaiming the top spot among privacy coins by market capitalization, just as Zcash was hit by a sudden developer exodus that has injected new uncertainty into its roadmap.

XMR was trading around $460 on Thursday, not far from the roughly $490 level it briefly touched in late December, according to The Block price data, extending a multi-week advance that has quietly outperformed much of the broader privacy-coin category.

The move follows a period in mid-to-late-2025 when Monero faded from view as traders piled into Zcash, which had emerged as the sector’s preferred privacy play during last year’s rally.

It also coincided with renewed scrutiny of Monero’s network stability. In September, the blockchain experienced its largest recorded block reorganization, reviving long-running concerns around reorg risk and mining concentration that weighed on sentiment even as the incident ultimately failed to disrupt the protocol’s long-term operation.

Monero (XMR) price chart. Source: The Block/TradingView

Zcash, by contrast, was gaining traction at the time on a different set of narratives, including heightened surveillance concerns, wallet integrations for shielded transactions, and a broader rotation into privacy-focused assets.

That rotation now appears to be reversing.

Zcash sold off sharply on Thursday after the entire Electric Coin Company team resigned following a governance dispute with its parent nonprofit board. ECC CEO Josh Swihart said the developers are forming a new company after what he described as a constructive discharge by the Bootstrap board, raising questions about near-term coordination around Zcash’s development and strategic direction.

The drop pushed ZEC down around 15% on the day before rebounding slightly, extending a pullback from its November highs and unwinding part of the surge that carried it back into the top-20 tokens late last year.