Zcash slides about 5% as analyst links privacy coin to hacker fund transfers

what happened

Zcash (ZEC) lost nearly 5% on Saturday after on-chain analyst Specter said criminals are using the privacy token to move stolen money. Stocktwits, which reported the claims, said Specter pointed to three incidents: a breach at Bitget, where security systems had flagged unauthorized outflows from some hot wallets; a theft involving Ledger hardware devices sold by a reseller in Southeast Asia; and the Triple-A hack at a Singapore stablecoin payments firm, which Specter put at $12 million.

ZEC has dropped more than 17% over the past month and was changing hands at $1,167 when the article was written. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits stayed in the "extremely bearish" zone.

The remarks came during a Token2049 panel in Singapore, where Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss argued that identity checks put users at risk. "Know your customer is becoming kill your customer," he said, adding that criminals who obtain data from breached vendors can learn where people live and how much they hold. Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan proposed zero-knowledge proofs as a replacement for document uploads, and both investors described Zcash as the private counterpart to Bitcoin.

why it matters

For traders, the episode ties a price decline to a wider debate over privacy coins, security and regulation. Winklevoss and Srinivasan set Zcash against Bitcoin's public ledger, a split that could become more relevant if rules for private assets tighten. The loss figure and the link to hackers come from a single analyst, so they should be treated as preliminary.

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