Zcash Price Crashes: Are Crypto Privacy Whales Rotating Into GHOST?

The privacy crypto market has gone through one of the most volatile stretches of 2025. After a sharp rally that pushed ZEC above $600 in November, the Zcash price dropped roughly 30-40% from its highs, a move amplified by public warnings from figures like Arthur Hayes and by straightforward profit-taking after the run-up.

At the same time, the segment as a whole expanded. Data from CoinGecko and analysts who track the privacy coin market put it in the billions of dollars, roughly around 1% of the total crypto market value.

Amid all of this, a narrative has started to emerge that some privacy whales are reallocating part of their capital from the big names, like ZEC and Monero, into smaller projects such as GhostwareOS ($GHOST). A sharp drop in Zcash, profit taking in XMR, and rotation into GHOST, which is still only in the low single-digit millions of dollars in market cap.

The question now being discussed among traders is whether this shift is just a short-term move or the beginning of a new phase for privacy cryptos built on top of high-performance infrastructure.

GhostwareOS: Best Crypto Candidate In The Solana Era

GhostwareOS is not a standalone blockchain. The project works as a modular privacy layer that plugs into Solana’s existing infrastructure. Private payments, wallet masking, on-chain metadata scrubbing, encrypted messaging, and routing through private relays are all part of the package.

The stack includes components such as:

• GhostPay, a private payments layer built to run directly on Solana’s speed and liquidity, allows sender, recipient, and amount to stay hidden from standard public block explorers.

• Tx ShadowNet and private relays, responsible for obfuscating where transactions originate and scrambling the path that data takes through the network.

• ID obfuscation and alias modules, which reduce how visible the links are between different wallets, sessions, and digital identities belonging to the same user.

Even so, $GHOST is still in an early phase. CoinGecko data places the token in the $0.007 to $0.008 range, with a market cap of roughly $7.5-8.8 million and a circulating supply close to 1 billion units.

That means that even after the 2025 run in the privacy niche, Ghost is still worth hundreds of times less than ZEC. It is a meaningful gap for anyone looking for lower-cap projects within the same sector.

ZEC Price, Volatility, And The Trigger For Rotation

On the Zcash side, 2025 has been intense. After a few relatively stable months, the privacy rally pushed the coin above $600 in November, putting ZEC among the best-performing cryptos in that stretch.

Then two opposing forces kicked in. On one side, there were headlines seen as positive, such as Grayscale’s filing to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot privacy ETF. On the other hand, there were warnings about the risks of holding ZEC on certain centralized exchanges and renewed regulatory concerns.

The result was a sharp correction. In just a few sessions, the ZEC price fell more than 30% from the peak, with coverage describing the move as a 37% drop from recent highs, while technical analysts pointed to the risk of further downside if key support levels failed to hold.

Even after the pullback, the Zcash price is still around $470, with a market cap of roughly $7.7 billion and close to 16.4 million coins in circulation, according to CoinMarketCap. For many traders, tracking the price is no longer just about watching a single coin, but about following a kind of thermometer for the whole privacy segment.

Whale Rotation And The Battle For Best Privacy Crypto To Buy

The debate over what is the best privacy crypto to buy right now goes well beyond whatever is on the price chart. In Zcash’s case, the focus remains on the combination of transparent and shielded addresses using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), which makes it possible to reconcile privacy with some level of auditability when needed.

GhostwareOS joins the discussion from a different angle. Rather than trying to replace an established L1, the protocol relies on Solana and adds a toolkit that makes transactions, messages, and identity less traceable inside an ecosystem already known for speed and low costs.

For traders who already use Solana in their day-to-day strategies, this lowers friction. There is no need to move everything over to a specialized privacy chain; they can simply attach the GHOST layer on top of what they are already doing.

While ZEC is dealing with corrections after strong gains, some of the more aggressive capital is shifting toward $GHOST, whose market cap is still only in the small single-digit millions of dollars.

The read is that privacy whales may be locking in profits on mature assets and testing new flows in projects that combine newer tech, a clear link between protocol usage and the token, and room for relative growth within the niche.

Final Thoughts

The recent pullback in Zcash does not erase ZEC’s role as one of the main benchmarks in privacy crypto, but it does reopen the discussion about how concentrated capital is in just a few names. The drop in the ZEC price after the rally, combined with a tougher regulatory backdrop, has led many traders to revisit their allocation to the segment and look more closely at solutions built on top of already proven infrastructure.

In that gap, GhostwareOS stands out as an alternative as the best privacy crypto to buy with a privacy operating system plugged into Solana, GhostPay for private payments, identity-obfuscation, and encrypted messaging modules, and a model where service fees flow entirely back to the token.