In the last 6 weeks, cryptocurrency markets have lost nearly $1 trillion in value and altcoins have hit new lows. During this period, some privacy altcoins, especially Zcash, diverged significantly positively. ZEC in particular rose the stronger the market-wide negativity. But why?
The Rise of Privacy Altcoins
While regulations in the cryptocurrency field are expanding, auditing rules are also tightening. FATF pressure and the EU’s new AML rules caused privacy altcoins to rise with protest motivation. The pressure facing mixers and efforts to limit the freedom underlying crypto has increased interest in altcoins with privacy capabilities.
Zcash has continuously increased its price since the end of summer. The market capitalization, which was below $1 billion in August, exceeded $7 billion in early November. Even dethrone Monero as the top privacy altcoin.
As an interesting detail, we can mention the increase in interest in the Coinbase exchange. Bitcoin for ZEC investors, which peaked in search volume within the exchange 
$91,270.62 and Ripple 
$2.21It has become more popular than . Clearly, US retail investors are showing interest in ZEC Coin.
Some of this interest ZEC Coin privacy around altcoins the hype it lives on. In other words, investors are interested in ZEC Coin not only due to privacy concerns or motivation, but also because there is growth in this area.
Concerns Brought by the Ascension
The NU6.1 update was one of the main things that caused the acceleration of the rise. The decreasing amount of issuance increased the belief in the future of ZEC Coin. On the other hand, there are also big risks. For example, EU-wide AML rules require licensed exchanges to ban privacy altcoins by 2027.
The EU’s expansion of its AML policy in this direction will cause the borders to narrow on a global scale. In other words, we can see that cryptocurrencies that allow complete anonymity are delisted in almost all popular centralized exchanges. This means Monero, Dash and ZEC Coin It will cause cryptocurrencies such as cryptocurrencies to experience problems in accessing liquidity.
Kraken launches in late 2024 for European Economic Area (EEA) customers XMR has already announced that it will cease its operations. In 2024, we saw 60 different privacy altcoin delist decisions on central exchanges. These details open the door to the idea that “maybe we may be seeing an increase that will create escape liquidity before being completely excluded from liquidity.”
