Zcash (ZEC) Cofounder Eli Ben-Sasson Calls $2,000 a “No-Brainer” for 2026

Ben-Sasson Places $2,000 Bet on OffMarket

Zcash (ZEC) cofounder Eli Ben-Sasson doubled down on a $2,000 target for the privacy coin in an X post published Thursday, calling the level a “no-brainer” while repeating a longer-term $5,000 call. The post landed with the Zcash price at $1,098, down 10.23% over the past 24 hours, after months of rallying carried the token to a $1,696 peak on September 26 and then turned. Ben-Sasson said he had already predicted elsewhere that ZEC would reach $5,000, but framed $2,000 as the easier milestone, and placed the wager on OffMarket, a privacy service built by StarkWare that lets users trade on Polymarket without publicly linking those positions to their wallet address. He described the platform as a “privacy VPN for Polymarket.” The screenshot attached to the post showed the odds for “what price will Zcash hit in 2026” alongside a bet on the token reaching $2,000 by the end of the year. The prediction, published on X on October 15, is a verifiable market position rather than a passing comment. Ben-Sasson, a Starknet cofounder who also worked on the layer 1 blockchain protocol that underpins Zcash, closed the post by flagging that the call is not investment advice and urging readers to do their own research. The arithmetic behind the target is steep: ZEC would need to climb more than 82% from its current level to reach $2,000. The gap widened after Wednesday’s inflation reading strengthened concerns that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates this month, a macro headwind that hit the broader altcoin market as a whole.

@EliBenSasson · X post

Published on X on October 15.

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ZEC Gave Back Its September Gains

The slide pushed ZEC below the daily 50-day moving average, the level that had supported its rally through August 2026. Reclaiming that average is the condition bulls need before the chart can retest the $1,300–$1,400 range, then $1,700, on the way back toward $2,000; our Zcash technical analysis tracks those shelves as they move. Earlier this month the token had a 30% pullback from September’s peak and defended the 50-day average after a 35% slide from the $1,700 peak; this week it surrendered that line. Engagement data show how much of the rally’s fuel had already burned off. Analytics firm Santiment recorded a roughly 48% gain for ZEC between September 15 and September 26, 2026, with nearly all of it handed back by October 14. Open interest peaked at 1.60 million ZEC and, by October 14, sat 2.5% below its September 15 level. Social volume peaked at 671 mentions, then thinned to 50 on October 14, the quietest reading since September 2. Price, meanwhile, had still pushed above $1,650 during the run, so the September leg higher came on falling attention and shrinking leverage rather than broad participation. In other words, the climb to $1,696 unfolded while the derivatives book was still building; the current slide is playing out on a book that has already been trimmed. Leverage and attention, the two accelerants of the September run, are both measured lower now than they were before the peak. The network’s next scheduled catalyst is the NU7 upgrade, whose mainnet decision is set for October 20, 2026. Social dominance around the project has stayed at its lowest level since early September 2026, so the upgrade call and the macro calendar will compete for the market’s attention inside the same window.

Read together, the two threads point in opposite directions. A cofounder staking his name on $2,000 is a sentiment event, not a capital flow: the position sits on a prediction market and pays out only if price follows, so it adds attention without adding a single dollar of buy pressure. The engagement record says the last leg toward $1,650 was already running on thinner participation than the surface numbers suggested. Anyone buying the target into that backdrop, without a reclaim of the 50-day average first, risks becoming exit liquidity if the range low gives way. Price has to do the work; the bet only records who was right. The NU7 decision on October 20 is the near-term catalyst to price in; the 50-day average is the line that would confirm or break the founder’s reading.