Zcash Crashes 27% as RSI Sinks Into Oversold Territory

• Zcash has lost more than a quarter of its value in a week and is trading in oversold territory.
• The network’s co-founders want to pull a large share of the community grants treasury and end its block reward income.
• Grayscale data shows the number of Zcash developers rising while the wider crypto developer base shrinks.
• ZEC holders vote on the funding plan in the second half of November.

Zcash (ZEC) traded near $943 on Friday, down 26.8% over seven days and 4.3% in the past 24 hours, while its founders formally advanced a plan to remove 50,000 ZEC from the Zcash Community Grants treasury and cut off the fund’s share of newly issued coins. The proposal became an official draft in the Zcash Improvement Proposals repository on November 11 and goes to a vote between November 16 and 30, in the same week Grayscale published research showing that the project’s active developer count has doubled in two years.

Buyers Showed Up Near $880

On the four-hour Binance chart, ZEC has fallen from a high near $1,388 on November 6 to an intraday low of $880.50 on Friday morning. That wick printed on one of the largest volume bars of the past two weeks and the candle closed well above its low, a sign that buyers absorbed the selling at that level. The RSI has stayed below 30 since November 10 and now reads 27, meaning sellers have controlled the market for an unusually long stretch, though the line has started to turn up above its signal average.

ZEC is now trying to hold $940, with $1,000 as the nearest resistance after the price failed there on November 11 and 12. The bigger test sits between $1,195 and $1,200, where the 200-period moving average (the average close of the last 200 four-hour candles, a common gauge of the medium-term trend) meets the 61.8% retracement of the decline. Below that zone the trend still points down, and a close under $880 would erase the floor that Friday’s buyers built.

Where the 50,000 ZEC Ends Up

Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox, fellow co-founder and protocol developer Sean Bowe, and Jason McGee of Shielded Labs, a donation-funded Zcash development group, want the five-member committee that runs Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) to send 50,000 ZEC, worth about $47 million today, to a published address from which no one can spend. The coins would be credited to the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), a protocol feature that records ZEC taken out of circulation and gradually reissues it to miners through future block rewards.

The second change targets the ongoing flow. ZCG currently receives 8% of every block reward, roughly 144 ZEC a day or about $136,000 at today’s price, and the draft would send that stream into a new Future Dev and Legal Defense Fund Lockbox until Zcash’s third halving, expected around 2028. The lockbox has no withdrawal rules, so spending from it would require a separate proposal. Miners keep their 80% share, the coinholder-controlled fund keeps its 12%, and ZCG continues issuing grants from what remains in its treasury.

Bowe first raised the idea on October 27, arguing that ZEC’s rally had swollen the treasury while new coins kept arriving automatically. The draft lists about 91,453 ZEC and $8.8 million in dollar assets against $2.4 million in grants already promised, with spending running at about $9.4 million a year. ZCG dropped a competing plan of its own on November 2 and 3 after heavy criticism, weeks after a roughly $461,500 grant to the private-payments project ZECsy drew complaints, although Bowe’s proposal does not mention that grant.

The $1,300 Assumption Has Expired

The authors valued the treasury at a hypothetical $1,300 per ZEC, which gave ZCG a runway of 6.4 years after the transfer. With ZEC about 27% below that figure, the numbers look noticeably tighter.

Grayscale Counts Twice as Many Zcash Developers

Grayscale’s November 10 report, built on Electric Capital data, puts active Zcash developers at roughly 190 to 200, about double the level of two years ago, while the total number of crypto developers has fallen to around 29,000 to 30,000 from its 2025 high. It also found that 70% of Zcash developers have more than a year of crypto experience, against 58% across the industry. Grayscale sponsors The Zcash ETF (ZCSH), which launched on NYSE Arca in August and sends part of its fee revenue back to the Zcash ecosystem, so it has a commercial stake in the asset, and Santiment’s GitHub-based tracker showed Zcash development activity at its weakest since 2021 as recently as January, a gap that reflects how differently the two providers measure developer work.

Grant Recipients Lose Their Safety Net if It Passes

ZEC holders and community panels vote from November 16 to 30, with Project Tachyon, Shielded Labs, Valar Group, the Zcash Foundation and ZODL coordinating. The poll is non-binding, and if it shows enough support, both changes would go live with a network upgrade called NU7.1 that has no activation date yet, after which ZCG would have 30 days to send the 50,000 ZEC. Without the automatic top-up, ZCG’s capacity to fund new wallet and infrastructure projects would rise and fall with the ZEC price. Rival drafts, including one that would shut ZCG down and a Zcash Adoption Pool proposal, are still under discussion.

Zcash has tried a lockbox before. Starting with the November 2024 halving, part of the block reward flowed into a Deferred Dev Fund Lockbox under ZIP 1015, which also launched without a withdrawal mechanism, and the community later used those coins to seed the coinholder-controlled fund that now receives 12% of new issuance. At the current spending pace, every $100 move in ZEC adds or removes roughly five months from ZCG’s remaining runway, which leaves the grants program heavily exposed to this week’s sell-off.