Zcash ( $ZEC ) has been through the same cycle of criticism at every key price level.

When it was ~$100, the loudest voices called it a scam.
When it dumped into the low-$300s, they repeated it.

Now that it’s pushing back into prior levels, the script is still the same.

This was never really about ZEC.
It was about people coping with what they didn’t buy.

Zoom out and the chart is telling a cleaner story than CT timelines.

On the 1H ZEC/USDT perp chart, price is sitting around $425 after a sharp recovery off the early-December lows. The market carved a base in the $303–$325 zone, then started printing higher highs and higher lows, the kind of structure you see when sellers get absorbed and momentum flips.

Right now the fight is clear:

Local trend support: roughly $395–$405 (the green box). Bulls want to keep bidding pullbacks there.

Bulls’ confidence point / overhead supply: roughly $440–$450 (the red box). That’s the area that tends to decide whether this is just a bounce… or the start of continuation.

Mid level to watch: $373.7 is the “don’t get sloppy” line. Lose the green box and this becomes the next obvious magnet.

Momentum check: RSI is near ~62, not euphoric, but not dead either, consistent with a trend that’s still leaning upward.

So while timelines argue about narratives, the market is doing something more practical: it’s re-pricing an asset that has one core value proposition people keep rediscovering the hard way.

Because Zcash isn’t built on hype cycles.

It’s built on a constraint that never goes away: privacy.

In a world where finance becomes more digital, more trackable, and more permissioned by default, privacy doesn’t become “optional.”

It becomes contested and therefore valuable.

That’s why years of FUD didn’t “kill” it.

Controversy didn’t “end” it.
And attempts to bury it mostly just created cheaper entries for people who actually understood what they were holding.

The irony is simple: the critics keep watching ZEC like it’s a meme they want to die.

The market keeps treating it like infrastructure.