21Shares Launches Europe's First Zcash ETP

Highlights

21Shares launched Europe's first Zcash ETP and a companion ETHFI ETP on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam, both charging 2.5% annual fees.
The listing follows Grayscale's US spot Zcash ETF (ZCSH), which grew to $313 million in assets within three days of its August 25 debut.
ZEC has surged more than 2,400% in 2026, briefly topping $1,650 this week and climbing into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Leveraged traders are seeing wild swings: one address is up roughly $70,700 (a 1,581% return) on a 50x long, while another trader lost another $79,000 trying to flip from short to long.

21Shares listed Europe's first exchange-traded product tied to Zcash on September 22, giving investors on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam a regulated, physically backed way to hold ZEC without touching a wallet or an exchange. The Zurich-based asset manager launched the Zcash ETP alongside a second physically backed product tracking ETHFI, the governance token of the Ether.fi restaking protocol, putting a privacy coin and a decentralized finance token on the same European listing day.

Both products are physically backed, meaning 21Shares holds the underlying tokens rather than using derivatives or synthetic exposure, and both carry an annual management fee of 2.5 percent. That fee sits well above what many European bitcoin and ether investment products charge, reflecting the higher custody and compliance overhead that comes with listing a privacy-focused asset like Zcash alongside a smaller-cap DeFi governance token like ETHFI.

The European listing lands three weeks after Grayscale opened the first US spot Zcash ETF, ticker ZCSH, on NYSE Arca on August 25, with Coinbase acting as custodian. That US fund launched holding roughly 387,000 ZEC worth about 260 million dollars and grew to 313 million dollars in assets within three days, a rapid uptake that coincided with ZEC surging 66 percent in the week around the listing to reach an eight-year high above 850 dollars. The Securities and Exchange Commission had cleared the path in January by closing its review of the Grayscale Zcash Trust without enforcement action.

A privacy coin having its moment

Zcash has kept climbing since then, a run that has also shown up in a string of short sellers getting crushed as the rally accelerated. The token has gone from roughly 40 dollars a year ago to briefly topping 1,650 dollars this week, a climb of more than 2,400 percent over the course of 2026 that has pushed it from the 82nd largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization into the top ten. On-chain traders have leaned hard into the move: one address on the Aster decentralized exchange opened a 50-times leveraged long on 140 ZEC worth about 224,000 dollars and was sitting on roughly 70,700 dollars in unrealized profit, a 1,581 percent return, as ZEC broke back above 1,600 dollars.

Not every leveraged bet has gone the same way. Garrett Jin, who had already lost about 35.44 million dollars shorting ZEC earlier in the rally, tried flipping to a long position as the token pushed higher this week, only to close it roughly seven hours later for another 79,000 dollars in losses, a smaller echo of the kind of reversal that has also sent other Zcash whales moving hundreds of millions toward exchanges as the token's all-time highs kept climbing.

That kind of two-sided volatility, with gains and losses running into the tens of millions on a single token, is precisely the backdrop against which 21Shares chose to bring a European ETP to market. Packaging a coin best known for its optional shielded transactions into a plain exchange-traded wrapper is a bet that institutional demand for regulated privacy-asset exposure will keep growing even as the underlying token remains a favorite of leveraged retail and whale traders. Pairing it with an ETHFI product on the same day suggests 21Shares sees comparable investor appetite building for liquid restaking and DeFi governance tokens, not just for Zcash specifically, a pattern of paired listings not unlike CME's recent move to list Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures side by side.

For European investors, the arrival of a physically backed Zcash ETP removes some of the friction, self-custody, exchange KYC, and direct exposure to a coin whose entire selling point is transaction privacy, that has kept many institutional allocators on the sidelines. Whether the 2.5 percent fee proves durable will likely depend on whether rival issuers follow Grayscale and 21Shares into the category, the same competitive dynamic that has already pushed bitcoin and ether ETF fees down sharply since their own debuts.