The Zcash ETF (ZCSH): What It Holds, Costs and Leaves Out

By Ryan Bethencourt, author of ZERO and PUNKS. Published November 2, 2026. Last updated November 2, 2026. Figures checked October 20, 2026.

What is the Zcash ETF (ZCSH)? Key facts at a glance

The Zcash ETF (ZCSH) is a spot ZEC exchange-traded product (ETP): a Grayscale trust that holds ZEC and issues shares that trade on NYSE Arca. Each row below is dated because the figures change daily.

Those post-split figures put ZCSH’s net assets at about $890 million at the split, a snapshot that moves with ZEC’s price.

Is there a Zcash ETF, and when did it launch?

Yes. The Zcash ETF, ticker ZCSH, began trading on NYSE Arca on Tuesday, August 25, 2026. Grayscale says that at launch it was “the first exchange-traded product in the world to offer spot exposure to ZEC” (Grayscale press release, September 8, 2026; Structured Retail Products, August 28, 2026).

The paper trail runs through SEC EDGAR. Grayscale filed a Form S-3 on November 26, 2025 to list the trust’s shares on NYSE Arca under ZCSH. Five amendments followed between January 30 and August 21, 2026. The registration became effective on August 24, and the shares traded the next morning.

On the Monday before launch the trust held over $313.5 million in assets, The Block reported. Grayscale’s head of index, Steve Vanourny, called ZCSH “a focused, higher-risk satellite position within a broader digital-asset allocation” (Decrypt, August 25, 2026).

On launch day, August 25, Zcash’s coinholders also opened their vote on the NU7 upgrade.

ZERO’s final chapter ends on this moment and tells it as the close of a ten-year argument about whether private money could be legitimate.

Then, on August 25, 2026, the ten-year war for Zcash’s institutional legitimacy reached its historic climax on Wall Street.

[…] Grayscale Investments officially launched The Zcash ETF on NYSE Arca under the ticker symbol ZCSH, with Coinbase serving as custodian.

Pause and consider the arc of that moment. In January 2024, ZEC was trading near twenty dollars, tagged for potential delisting on Binance, and written off by almost every pundit in finance as a regulatory pariah. On August 25, 2026, ZCSH became the first spot privacy-coin exchange-traded product to trade on a major U.S. stock exchange, opening Zcash to every retirement account, pension fund, and brokerage platform in America.

Wall Street’s verdict was immediate. On September 4, 2026, ten days after ZCSH began trading on NYSE Arca, ZEC shattered the $1,000 barrier for the first time in nearly a decade, and by late September it had touched about $1,680, a more than fifty-fold resurrection from its 2024 lows. […]

Ten years after six witnesses destroyed the secrets that could have counterfeited Zcash, the math had won.

[lightly edited for accuracy]

Excerpted from ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter 12, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

The record supports the chapter’s dates. CoinMarketCap shows ZEC’s first trade above $1,000 since November 2016 on September 4, 2026. And “more than fifty-fold” is modest: from about $16 on July 5, 2024 to $1,683.55 on September 26, 2026 is roughly a hundredfold.

Two lines need context:

• “Every” platform: access depends on each broker’s crypto policy, so the word is a flourish.
• Supply off the market: the chapter goes on to add ZCSH’s coins to those in shielded pools and count the sum as off the market. On the record, that sum is nearly a third of all ZEC: about 4.92 million shielded ZEC, 29.02 percent of supply on September 18, 2026 (Tokenomist, from the Zcash Dashboard), plus ZCSH’s 3.52 percent.

If any of the fund’s coins sit in shielded addresses, that sum counts them twice. And as Tokenomist notes, shielded coins are not locked: their owners can still sell.

What is ZCSH’s expense ratio?

ZCSH charges a sponsor fee of 2.5 percent a year, accrued daily and paid in ZEC. The fee accrues in U.S. dollars, is converted into ZEC at the benchmark price and “is payable in ZEC to the Sponsor daily in arrears,” the prospectus says. Grayscale “does not intend to waive any of the Sponsor’s Fee” for now.

The rate is the same 2.5 percent the old trust charged, according to its quarterly report for March 31, 2025. In March 2026, shareholders consented to having it paid daily instead of monthly (8-K, March 10, 2026).

Because the fee is paid in coins, each share slowly represents less ZEC. On March 31, 2025, the trust held 395,184.26 ZEC against 4,759,200 shares, about 0.0830 ZEC per share. By June 30, 2026, it was about 0.0805. That 3 percent decline over 15 months is the fee at work.

On a $10,000 position at a flat price, the fee comes to about $250 a year.

The fee also has a tax wrinkle. The Sponsor treats the trust as a grantor trust for U.S. tax purposes, and the prospectus calls that treatment uncertain. Each time the trust pays the fee in ZEC, “each U.S. Holder will be treated as having sold its pro rata share of that ZEC,” the prospectus says.

A Grayscale spokesperson told The Block on launch day that the fee’s revenue “will be directed back to the Zcash ecosystem.” The prospectus puts limits on that promise. The Sponsor “intends to use 100% of the Sponsor’s Fee” for up to 12 months after the registration took effect, on marketing the fund and on initiatives that support “the development, marketing and education of the Zcash Network.” The prospectus calls this a voluntary undertaking that the Sponsor may change or end at any time.

Who holds the ZEC behind ZCSH?

The Zcash ETF’s primary custodian is Coinbase Custody Trust Company, which holds the fund’s ZEC. Since a September 29, 2026 agreement, Anchorage Digital Bank N.A. may hold part of it as an additional custodian. Coinbase, Inc. acts as prime broker and maintains the trust’s settlement balance.

Grayscale’s October 5, 2026 prospectus supplement says Coinbase “remains the Trust’s primary custodian” and that Grayscale “has not determined the total amount of the Trust’s ZEC it will move to Anchorage Digital.” Under the related 8-K, Anchorage Digital:

• generates and holds the private keys on a hardware security module in the United States;
• must carry at least $100 million of crime insurance or a fidelity bond;
• is paid by the Sponsor, not the fund.

How much ZEC does Grayscale’s Zcash ETF hold?

ZCSH held 596,268.94 ZEC on September 18, 2026, about 3.52 percent of circulating supply, Crypto Briefing reported. Before the listing, on June 30, 2026, the trust’s share was about 2.3 percent, according to the prospectus.

New coins arrive through authorized participants, the trading firms that create and redeem shares in blocks; the prospectus names Jane Street Capital and Virtu Americas. Creations can be paid in cash or ZEC, and redemptions only in cash. Crypto Briefing reported that all of the fund’s growth through September 18 came from in-kind creations.

The largest single deposit, Crypto Briefing reported, came from Grayscale’s own parent. A September 8, 2026 8-K says a Digital Currency Group subsidiary acquired about $100 million of shares “in exchange for 85,705.32563297 ZEC tokens.”

The filings through October 5, 2026 leave one question open: whether the custodians hold the fund’s ZEC in shielded or transparent addresses.

Zcash ETF vs ZEC: what changes when you hold ZCSH?

Holding ZCSH swaps the coin for a security. You give up self-custody, shielded privacy and a vote, and you gain a brokerage wrapper that trades in market hours. The table uses the fund’s own documents.

The prospectus also lists individual retirement accounts among holders subject to special tax rules. Neither route is better in the abstract; they are different products for different jobs.

Does owning ZCSH give me Zcash’s privacy?

No. Zcash’s privacy applies to shielded ZEC held in your own wallet, where zero-knowledge proofs hide the sender, the receiver and the amount of each payment. A ZCSH shareholder owns a brokerage position, recorded by a broker like any other stock.

The privacy is in the transaction, not the asset. When ZEC moves between shielded addresses, the network checks a zk-SNARK, a proof that the payment follows the rules, instead of reading the payment details.

ZERO also explains viewing keys, which let a holder show an auditor or exchange chosen transactions without exposing the rest. None of that reaches a share certificate. Our guide to how Zcash’s shielded transactions work covers the mechanics.

How is the Zcash ETF different from the old Grayscale Zcash Trust?

The Zcash ETF is the same trust as the old Grayscale Zcash Trust, with the same ticker, sponsor, primary custodian and 2.5 percent fee. What changed is the plumbing: an exchange listing plus ongoing creations and redemptions, which is what keeps an ETF’s share price close to the value of its coins.

The old trust sold shares to accredited investors in private placements, and its shares qualified for the OTCQX market on October 18, 2021. It ran no redemption program; as late as March 2025 it said it had “no intention of seeking regulatory approval to operate an ongoing redemption program.”

Without that release valve, the share price drifted from the value of its ZEC. The discount was 17 percent on June 30, 2026, and it narrowed to 1 percent by August 20 (S-3 amendment 5).

Shareholders approved four changes in a consent solicitation that closed on March 3, 2026:

1. cash creations and redemptions;
2. daily fee payment;
3. omnibus custody accounts;
4. wider amendment powers for the Sponsor.

The trust holds a single asset and is not a fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940.

What did the SEC say about ZEC before the ETF?

The SEC asked hard questions about ZEC for nearly four years, and none of them ended in an enforcement action. Staff pressed Grayscale in 2022 to disclose that ZEC “may be a security,” and the agency subpoenaed the Zcash Foundation in 2023. On January 14, 2026, the Foundation announced that the SEC had closed that inquiry without recommending enforcement.

The 2022 episode came from paperwork. After Grayscale filed a Form 10 on May 5, 2022 to register the trust’s shares, SEC staff asked on June 13 for Grayscale’s “analysis that ZEC is not a security.” Staff also asked it to “clarify that ZEC, based on the relevant facts as they exist today, may be a security under the federal securities laws.”

Grayscale’s counsel, Davis Polk, answered on June 28, 2022 with a legal memorandum and revised disclosure. Staff comments are not a ruling.

The subpoena arrived on August 31, 2023, in an inquiry titled “In the Matter of Certain Crypto Asset Offerings (SF-04569).” On January 14, 2026, the Zcash Foundation said the SEC “does not intend to recommend any enforcement action” against it.

On March 17, 2026, the SEC issued an interpretation, joined by the CFTC, naming 16 examples of digital commodities, from Bitcoin and Ether to Dogecoin and XRP (Release No. 33-11412; press release 2026-30). ZEC was not among them. The list gives examples, so the omission decides nothing. The wider legal picture is in our guide to whether privacy coins are legal (publishing November 6).

Why did it take until 2026 for a privacy coin to get an ETF?

The record points to three obstacles that had to clear before a privacy coin could get an ETF:

1. Legal status: a cloud over ZEC’s status under securities law, which eased by January 2026.
2. Delistings: years of exchange delistings of privacy coins, which eased from July 2025.
3. Structure: a trust with no redemption mechanism, solved by the conversion itself, which Grayscale filed for in November 2025.

The ceremony and the delistings (2016 to 2023)

On October 22 and 23, 2016, six participants at six stations, one of them a Boulder hotel room, generated the parameters for Zcash’s proofs and destroyed their pieces of the secret randomness. Zooko Wilcox knew every participant, and the scheme stayed safe if even one share was destroyed. Zcash launched on October 28, 2016; our account of the Zcash ceremony tells the story.

A year to the day after the ceremony ended, on October 23, 2017, Grayscale formed its Zcash trust. Then came the delistings:

• pressure from Japan’s regulator by 2018 and Bittrex in January 2021, as ZERO records;
• Huobi’s removal of seven privacy coins, ZEC and Monero among them, in September 2022, citing “the latest financial regulations” (Decrypt).

2024: the Binance tag and the low

On January 4, 2024, Binance put its Monitoring Tag, a warning of delisting risk, on ten tokens including Zcash, Monero, Firo and Horizen (Binance). ZEC traded near $20 and bottomed at about $16 on July 5, 2024 (CoinMarketCap).

2025: the run and the Grayscale filing

On July 9, 2025, Binance removed the tag, citing “a recent review” (U.Today). The rally that followed is the hinge of ZERO’s tenth chapter.

The chapter reads that rally as scarcity meeting a privacy scare. The November 2024 halving had already cut fresh ZEC issuance by 50 percent. Worry about central bank digital currencies had turned financial privacy into a market theme.

The run, with prices from CoinMarketCap’s daily data:

• October 1, 2025: ZEC broke through $100.
• October 9, 2025: $200.
• October 31, 2025: $400, the day ZEC’s market value passed Monero’s.
• November 7, 2025: ZEC hit $736.51.
• November 26, 2025: with ZEC near $520, Grayscale filed to convert its trust.

By early November more than a quarter of all ZEC sat in shielded pools. On November 7, Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder, posted that ZEC now ranked second among the liquid positions in his Maelstrom portfolio, trailing only Bitcoin (Cointelegraph).

The chapter reads Grayscale’s filing as Zcash graduating into an institutional asset. The full run is told in Chapter 10 of ZERO, The 2025 Awakening.

Hayes, as a BitMEX co-founder, pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and was pardoned by President Trump on March 27, 2025 (The Block). He later said he had sold his entire ZEC position in June 2026, after the Orchard flaw was disclosed (FX Empire).

The road from Boulder to NYSE Arca, in dates

1. October 22 to 23, 2016: the parameter ceremony; Zcash launches on October 28.
2. October 23, 2017: the Grayscale Zcash Trust is formed.
3. June 13, 2022: SEC staff ask Grayscale to disclose that ZEC “may be a security.”
4. August 31, 2023: SEC subpoena to the Zcash Foundation.
5. January 4, 2024: Binance Monitoring Tag on ZEC.
6. July 9, 2025: Binance removes the tag.
7. November 26, 2025: Grayscale files its S-3.
8. January 7, 2026: the Electric Coin Company’s team resigns and goes on to form ZODL (what ZODL is).
9. January 14, 2026: the SEC inquiry closes with no enforcement recommendation.
10. June to July 2026: the Orchard flaw is disclosed and fixed; Ironwood activates on July 28.
11. August 25, 2026: ZCSH trades on NYSE Arca.

For the full sweep from the cypherpunks onward, read our complete history of Zcash, or browse every guide in the privacy and cryptography hub.

Did the Orchard bug delay the Zcash ETF?

No filing or Grayscale statement says the Orchard bug delayed the Zcash ETF. The record shows only timing: no amendment was filed between April 2 and July 31, 2026, the window in which the flaw was found and fixed, and the next amendment came three days after the Ironwood upgrade went live.

In May 2026, security researcher Taylor Hornby found a four-year-old vulnerability in the Orchard shielded pool with help from a frontier AI model, Decrypt reported. Grayscale’s filing calls it “a critical vulnerability,” disclosed in June 2026, that “could have been exploited to create counterfeit ZEC.” Because of Zcash’s privacy features, Decrypt noted, nobody could determine cryptographically whether it had been exploited.

The filing says ZEC’s price “declined by approximately 50%” after the disclosure. CoinMarketCap shows a $621.02 close on June 3 and a $255.78 low on June 5.

On July 28, the Ironwood upgrade “retired the Orchard pool and introduced a new shielded pool,” in the filing’s words, with rules to trap any counterfeit coins, Decrypt reported. Amendment 3 followed on July 31, two more came in August, and the fund listed on August 25.

The full story is in how the Orchard flaw was found and how Ironwood fixed it.

What happened to ZEC’s price after the Zcash ETF launched?

ZEC jumped 29 percent on August 21, 2026, when the filings signaled a listing date. It crossed $1,000 on September 4, hit $1,683.55 on September 26, its highest through October 19, and closed at $1,151.31 on October 19. These are dated, historical figures from CoinMarketCap’s daily data in UTC, not a forecast.

Two details stand out:

• The listing signal beat the listing: the biggest one-day gain between August 1 and October 19, 2026 came on August 21, when the filings signaled a listing date. On launch day ZEC closed below its open.
• A first since 2016: ZEC never reached $1,000 in the 2017 to 2018 boom, peaking near $955 on January 7, 2018.

September 2026 also brought the NU7 vote results, so the data cannot assign the rise to any single cause. Readers weighing ZEC as an investment will find both sides in our bull and bear case for Zcash, and the NU7 upgrade that coinholders voted on is explained in what NU7 changes for Zcash.

Why does a privacy coin on a stock exchange matter?

A privacy coin on a stock exchange matters because it settles an argument that ran for a decade: whether money with strong privacy could live inside regulated finance. ZCSH does not make Zcash private for its shareholders. It shows that a regulator, a custodian and an exchange could all handle the coin.

I joined the Zcash community in mid-2025, and I co-wrote ZERO while testing frontier AI models. The book’s Epilogue is dated October 2026, the month Zcash turned ten.

In October 2016, in a dimly lit hotel suite in Boulder, Colorado, Zooko Wilcox watched a progress bar crawl across the screen of an air-gapped computer, praying that the mathematics of zero-knowledge proofs would hold.

[…]

Why did Zcash refuse to die when exchanges delisted it, when regulators circled, and when its price fell ninety-nine percent from its launch-day mania? Because privacy is not a passing fashion trend. Privacy is the oxygen of human agency. In a world where every payment, every message, every search query, and every artificial intelligence prompt is logged, analyzed, and monetized by centralized corporations and surveillance states, the ability to whisper, to transact with another human being without asking permission from a panopticon, is what keeps a free society free.

Excerpted from ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin by Ryan Bethencourt, Epilogue, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

The ninety-nine percent is real: ZEC’s launch mania printed a CoinMarketCap high of $5,941.80 on October 29, 2016, and by February 2017 it traded below $30.

The ETF sits on top of that history. Owning Zcash and owning its ETF are now two different experiences, and both are worth understanding.

Zcash ETF FAQ

How do I buy the Zcash ETF?

The Zcash ETF trades on NYSE Arca, so it is bought and sold under the ticker ZCSH through a brokerage account that offers NYSE Arca-listed products. Availability differs by broker, and some restrict crypto products. Shares trade in market hours, and the fund values its ZEC daily using the CoinDesk Zcash Benchmark Rate. This page describes the product and does not recommend buying it.

Is ZCSH the first privacy-coin ETF?

Grayscale says that at launch ZCSH was “the first exchange-traded product in the world to offer spot exposure to ZEC.” ZERO calls it the first privacy-coin exchange-traded product on a major U.S. exchange. Both claims describe the August 25, 2026 listing, and neither comes from a regulator.

Do Zcash treasury companies exist?

Yes. One listed example is Cypherpunk Technologies (Nasdaq: CYPH), which reported holding 323,394.38 ZEC as of August 11, 2026, about 1.92 percent of circulating supply, at an average purchase price of $341.83. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox became a strategic advisor to the company in December 2025. Unlike ZCSH, a treasury company holds ZEC on its own balance sheet.

Can ZCSH holders vote in Zcash coinholder polls?

No. ZCSH shareholders own shares, not ZEC, and the prospectus says they take no part in managing the trust. Zcash’s coinholder polls count coins in voters’ own wallets. For the NU7 vote, held from August 25 to September 14, 2026, only spendable, shielded ZEC in the Ironwood pool at block 3,459,350 qualified, and transparent balances did not count.

Does ZCSH pay a dividend?

No. The prospectus says shareholders “will not receive dividends,” and the payout it does describe is a cash distribution if the trust is dissolved. Zcash is a proof-of-work network with no native staking as of October 2026, so there is no yield to pass through, and the trust irrevocably abandons forked or airdropped assets.

How much ZEC does one ZCSH share represent?

Each ZCSH share represented about 0.0805 ZEC on June 30, 2026, before the 3-for-1 split of September 30, 2026. Dividing by three gives roughly 0.027 ZEC per post-split share. The figure falls a little every day as the 2.5 percent fee is paid in ZEC, so each share’s value tracks ZEC minus accumulated fees.

Sources and further reading

1. Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC), Form S-3 registration statement, SEC EDGAR, November 26, 2025.
2. Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC), Form S-3/A, amendment no. 5, SEC EDGAR, August 21, 2026.
3. The Zcash ETF, prospectus (Rule 424(b)(3)), SEC EDGAR, August 24, 2026.
4. Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC), Form 8-K on the anticipated listing and name change, August 21, 2026.
5. The Zcash ETF, Forms 8-K on the DCG creation (September 8, 2026, with Grayscale’s press release), the split announcement (September 18, 2026) and the completed split (September 30, 2026).
6. The Zcash ETF, Form 8-K on the Anchorage Digital custody agreement and prospectus supplement no. 1, October 5, 2026.
7. Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC), Form 8-K on the shareholder consent and amended trust agreement, March 10, 2026, and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2025.
8. Davis Polk & Wardwell, response to SEC staff comments on the trust’s Form 10, June 28, 2022.
9. Zcash Foundation, “Notice Concluding SEC Investigation”, January 14, 2026.
10. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, press release 2026-30 and Release No. 33-11412, March 17, 2026.
11. Jason Nelson, “Grayscale Launches Zcash ETF Following Critical Privacy Flaw That Rocked the Cryptocurrency”, Decrypt, August 25, 2026.
12. Sarah Wynn, Grayscale’s Zcash ETF debut, The Block, August 25, 2026.
13. “Grayscale launches first spot ZEC ETP”, Structured Retail Products, August 28, 2026.
14. “Grayscale’s ZCSH ETF increases Zcash holdings by 28% to 596,269 ZEC”, Crypto Briefing, September 20, 2026.
15. Tokenomist, Zcash shielded balances and ETF holdings, September 19, 2026.
16. Binance, Monitoring Tag announcement, January 4, 2024, and U.Today, on the tag’s removal, July 9, 2025.
17. Decrypt, Huobi delists seven privacy coins, September 12, 2022.
18. Cypherpunk Technologies, second-quarter 2026 results, August 12, 2026.
19. COINTURK NEWS, NU7 coinholder vote snapshot and eligibility, August 24, 2026.
20. The Block, Trump pardons BitMEX co-founders, March 28, 2025.
21. Cointelegraph, Arthur Hayes on ZEC as Maelstrom’s second-largest liquid holding, November 8, 2025, and FX Empire, on Hayes selling his ZEC, June 5, 2026.
22. CoinMarketCap, Zcash historical data (daily, UTC), checked October 20, 2026.

Related reading on Grey Area Labs

• Privacy and zero-knowledge cryptography: every Zcash guide
• ZERO: The Zcash Revolution, the book behind this series of guides
• Zcash NU7 explained: 25-second blocks and every upgrade since 2016
• Zcash Ironwood and the AI-assisted Orchard audit
• Are privacy coins legal? Where Zcash and Monero stand (publishing November 6)
• AI coding agents in 2026: Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot, on the AI tools now reviewing code
• What is Bittensor? A guide to TAO and decentralized AI, from another book in the series
• All books by Ryan Bethencourt

Changelog: figures checked on October 20, 2026 against SEC EDGAR filings through October 5, 2026 and CoinMarketCap daily data through October 19, 2026.