Zcash goes to Paris, brings privacy receipts and a 2.5% fee 🧅

European asset manager 21Shares listed Europe's first exchange-traded product tracking Zcash on Tuesday, bringing the privacy coin to brokerage accounts on Euronext Paris and Euronext Amsterdam under the ticker ZCASH. The physically backed product launched with 5,000 securities outstanding, a net asset value of $20.04 per unit and approximately $100,000 in assets under management on day one, according to the issuer's factsheet. ZCASH trades in euros in Paris and in dollars in Amsterdam, with BitGo named as custodian, and carries a 2.5% annual management fee, well above what most Bitcoin and Ether investment products charge on the same venues. 21Shares simultaneously introduced a companion physically backed ETP tracking ETHFI, the governance and utility token of restaking protocol Ether.fi, which lists on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam at the same 2.5% fee.

The European listing follows the August conversion of Grayscale's nine-year-old Zcash Trust into the ZCSH ETF on NYSE Arca in the United States. Zcash is a privacy coin that lets users shield balances and transfers, in contrast to transparent ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The project forks Bitcoin's code and retains its 21 million coin cap, proof-of-work mining and halving schedule, and coinholders voted 98.9% last week to keep that Bitcoin-style halving model rather than adopt smoother issuance.

Zcash has been one of the crypto market's strongest performers, with ZEC recently surpassing $1,500 and gaining nearly 1,100% over the past year, according to CoinMarketCap data. Other trackers put the year-to-date climb above 2,700%. The token pushed past $1,600 after the ETP listing, touched an intraday high near $1,680 on Wednesday, then eased back to roughly $1,522, a slide of about 6.6% on the day, leaving ZEC's market capitalization near $27.5 billion, the ninth-largest among crypto assets. Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl has argued that Zcash could benefit from "second-mover advantages" that may help it overcome Bitcoin's entrenched network effects.

Institutional interest has also reached the mining sector. Fortitude Digital Mining told Cointelegraph that it mined about 28% of all ZEC produced in the first half of 2026, citing Zcash's proof-of-work model, capped supply and privacy features as the basis for its focus. Dragonfly's Qureshi has separately called for an end to the Zcash development fund after 2028, while the network's Ironwood upgrade is facing a possible delay over infrastructure readiness. With both a US-listed ETF and a European ETP now trading under the names ZCSH and ZCASH, regulated exposure to the privacy coin is available across the Atlantic for the first time.