Winklevoss-backed Cypherpunk targets 5% of Zcash supply with $58 million treasury seed

Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss on Wednesday unveiled Cypherpunk Technologies, a rebrand of Leap Therapeutics backed by a $58.9 million Winklevoss Capital investment aimed at acquiring and holding the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash.

Cypherpunk said it has already purchased 203,775 ZEC at an average price of roughly $245 per coin — about $50 million in total — and plans to lift its holdings to at least 5% of Zcash’s total supply.

Zcash, like bitcoin, has a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins. With roughly 16.3 million ZEC currently in circulation, Cypherpunk’s initial purchase already accounts for about one-fifth of its 5% accumulation goal.

“Privacy is the precondition for many of our freedoms,” Winklevoss wrote on X. “It’s the point at which government and corporate reach end and our individual freedoms and self-sovereignty begin.”

The company begins trading on the Nasdaq under the new ticker CYPH on Thursday.

The rebrand marks a pivot for the former biotech firm, which will continue its cancer-drug research through a wholly owned subsidiary that retains the Leap Therapeutics name.

Alongside the funding and name change, the company appointed Khing Oei as board chair and Will McEvoy as chief investment officer. The company, led by CEO Douglas Onsi, said it believes privacy-protecting assets and related technologies will be critical in an increasingly digital world.

Winklevoss compared Zcash’s role to bitcoin’s, calling it “encrypted bitcoin” and suggesting the privacy coin could eventually represent a meaningful share of bitcoin’s market value. “If bitcoin is digital gold, Zcash is digital cash,” he wrote, arguing that the two assets “go hand in hand.”

ZEC has rallied sharply in recent weeks, reaching a more than seven-year high above $720 last week before pulling back to about $460 as of Wednesday, according to The Block’s price page.

Zcash (ZEC) Price Chart. Source: The Block/TradingView.

In a recent episode of The Block’s “Big Brain” podcast, Zcash co-founder and StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson echoed those views, describing Zcash as “a solution to two problems — privacy and scalability — on public blockchains,” and contrasting it with mix-based approaches like Monero.