Privacy Coin Nears $1,100 Support After Big Z Exit Over Grant Dispute

ZEC Down 9% as Grants Fight Spreads

Zcash (ZEC) trades at $1,137, sitting between the $1,100 support it is drifting toward and the $1,238 resistance above it. The quote carries an 8.84% daily loss, and market data put the token near $1,143 early on Tuesday before it settled a fraction lower. The drop is not sector-wide. Monero (XMR) added 0.58% to $605 and Dash fell 4.71% to $45.95 over the same window, which leaves ZEC's selling pressure in a category of its own. The slide follows a steep run-up in recent months, which sharpened profit-taking. Three pressures stack up in the move: broad market weakness, that profit-taking, and a dispute inside the Zcash community over who controls the development fund and how its money is spent. The fund's design sits at the center of the argument. Zcash routes 20% of every blockchain block reward to development, and 8% of that share goes to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), a committee that selects funded projects through its own review, with no token-holder vote. The dispute widened on October 30, when the Zcash Adoption Pool (ZAP) proposal was published. It sets out ways to extend ZEC use to refugees and socially vulnerable groups with limited access to financial services, and to people who need humanitarian support. The proposal touched a nerve because it redefines what the mining-supported fund may pay for. Some large holders objected that money drawn from mining rewards should not fund work far removed from cryptographic development. On October 31, an investor known as Big Z said on social media that he had sold his ZEC, arguing the fund should back cryptographic technology rather than political statements. Neither the size of the sale nor its transaction record has been verified independently. The exit landed as the argument spread across social channels, giving it a market dimension beyond the text of the proposal itself.

Our composite support and resistance scoring frames the band the quote now occupies. The floor at $1,100.77 scores 100 out of 100, the strongest reading on the board, with the Fibonacci 0.500 retracement and the Ichimoku cloud bottom among the indicators meeting there. The ceiling at $1,238.01 scores 98 out of 100, where the 20-day and 50-day exponential averages converge. Momentum agrees with the weaker tape: the daily RSI reads 41.99 and the MACD signal is bearish. Perpetual futures funding stays marginally positive at 0.0054%, so longs still pay to hold rather than the reverse. The full level map sits in our Zcash technical analysis.

Sean Bowe's Redirect Proposal

The conflict has pulled in prominent names. Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe proposed on October 27 halting new reward allocations to ZCG and returning that share to mining rewards, arguing the committee's asset base had grown to roughly $125 million on the price run and that the allocation structure needs re-examination. Investor Naval Ravikant took the narrower position that a $50 million cap on community grants is sufficient. Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder of the Gemini exchange, likened a fund that holders cannot directly control to “taxation without representation,” a position set out further in the twins' call to end the grants committee. ZCG has answered with a compromise: it will scale back new allocations and move about 36,200 ZEC from existing holdings into a network sustainability fund. The compromise arrived days after Big Z's exit, and neither side has claimed it settles the question of control. The disagreement over who runs the fund remains unresolved. Bowe's redirect and Ravikant's cap both accept the fund's existence while contesting its size, a narrower argument than the one Winklevoss makes. Positioning leans bearish as well. Tracked large-trader contract trading on Hyperliquid shows about $193 million in ZEC shorts against $136 million in longs, with roughly 59% of tracked exposure betting on a decline. Total open interest fell about 17% over the past week, though that sample covers a portion of Hyperliquid accounts, not the market as a whole. The chart tells a similar story: ZEC peaked near $1,698 in late September, failed above $1,390 at the end of October and has declined since. Attention now turns to the NU7 network upgrade scheduled for November 5, which shortens block generation from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. The reading as it stands: the quote at $1,137 rests about $36 above the $1,100 floor and roughly $101 beneath the $1,238 ceiling, with the floor the nearer edge.