Arthur Hayes has put Zcash at the center of his crypto thesis, saying in an interview with Unchained founder Laura Shin that ZEC is now โprobably my largest position outside of Bitcoin.โ The BitMEX co-founder framed the trade as a bet on rising demand for financial privacy as AI, Big Tech and governments make public-chain activity easier to analyze.
Hayes said he views Zcash as the strongest privacy asset in crypto, while acknowledging that the debate between Zcash, Monero and other privacy coins remains unsettled. โI think Zcash is the best,โ Hayes said. He added that he is โnot a cryptographer,โ but said his view was shaped by reading competing arguments and speaking with developers working directly on privacy systems.
His argument was not that Bitcoin should become fully private. Hayes said Bitcoinโs transparent ledger still has advantages for accountability, but argued that transparency comes with a growing trade-off as surveillance tools improve. โWith AI, big tech and big government, itโs very trivial to de-anonymize transactions,โ he said.
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That, in Hayesโ view, creates room for a separate privacy asset to accrue value alongside Bitcoin rather than inside it. He described Zcash and Monero as trading at very low relative values versus BTC and called the setup asymmetric if privacy demand becomes more obvious to investors. The catalyst, as he sees it, is not merely regulatory pressure or user preference, but the exponential improvement of AI systems that can link activity across public data sets.
Arthur on why the Zcash and NEAR integration is the quietly building mechanism that flips NEAR from inflationary to deflationary
โShielded Zcash lets you swap and send any coin, USDT on Tron, Bitcoin, anything, and that transaction will not point back to you. Completelyโฆ https://t.co/AOWKNsDRbc pic.twitter.com/tytoAgM5q0
โ Laura Shin (@laurashin) May 12, 2026
Hayes Connects Zcash And NEAR In Latest Essay
Hayes extended that thesis in his latest Crypto Trader Digest essay, โThe Butterfly Touch,โ dated May 11 on his Substack. In the essay, Hayes argued that rising dollar and yuan liquidity, driven by AI infrastructure spending, geopolitical conflict and renewed credit creation, has reopened the risk-on window for crypto markets. He said Bitcoin bottomed earlier this year at $60,000 and argued that a move back to $126,000 is a โforegone conclusionโ if fiat liquidity keeps expanding.
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The essayโs altcoin section was more explicit. Hayes wrote that it is โtime to shitcoin,โ saying Hyperliquid and Zcash are already large enough positions for Maelstrom, while NEAR is his โnext favoriteโ trade. He said his next essay would lay out why the โprivacy narrativeโ combined with Near Intents could create a โpositive cash flow situationโ for the protocol.
That framing links Zcash and NEAR under a broader privacy-and-utility thesis. Zcash represents Hayesโ preferred pure-play privacy exposure, while NEAR appears to be the next asset he wants to connect to that theme through intent-based execution and potential protocol-level cash flow. He argued that such a setup could help reverse NEARโs weak token performance and potentially push it back toward older cycle highs.
For Zcash, Hayesโ case is more direct. He said privacy is likely to become more valuable as public blockchains become easier to interrogate with increasingly capable AI systems. โPeople want that privacy,โ he said. โAnd there will be a private alternative.โ
At press time, Zcash traded at $541.75.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
