Grayscale filed a fourth amendment to its S-3 registration statement for the Grayscale Zcash Trust on Tuesday, moving the fund another step closer to converting into what would be the first US spot ETF built around a privacy coin. The filing itself, submitted to the SEC under registration number 333-291800, proposes renaming the vehicle the Grayscale Zcash Trust ETF and listing its shares on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH.
Under the amended structure, shares would be created and redeemed continuously in baskets of 10,000, primarily through cash orders facilitated by liquidity providers, with in-kind creation still available but in-kind redemption no longer permitted — a change from the prior amendment. Coinbase Custody would continue serving as custodian and BNY Mellon as administrator, with the fund's holdings tracked against the CoinDesk Zcash Price Index.
From Trust to ETF, One Amendment at a Time
Grayscale first filed to convert the Zcash Trust into a spot ETF back in May, and Tuesday's submission is the fourth round of amendments since then, reflecting the back-and-forth typical of SEC review for a novel product category. As of the end of March, the trust held roughly 391,103 ZEC, worth about $99.4 million at the time.
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It's a notably smaller vehicle than Grayscale's flagship Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts, but the filing carries outsized significance as a test case for whether a coin built specifically around transaction privacy can clear the same regulatory bar that spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs already have.
Why Privacy Coins Are Back in Focus
The filing arrives amid a broader run higher for Zcash, which rallied as much as 650-1,000% off its 2024 lows to peak near $642 in May before settling into consolidation. Much of that move traces back to a single disclosure: Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain revealed the firm had quietly built a significant ZEC position since February 2024, framing it publicly as a hedge against rising political risk and a bet on demand for what he called "seizure-resistant assets." That framing has stuck, and Zcash's ongoing network security work — including the recent Ironwood upgrade that closed a four-year-old vulnerability in its shielded pool — has given institutional buyers more to point to beyond price momentum alone.
What Approval Would Mean
If the SEC ultimately signs off, ZCSH would become the first regulated US spot vehicle for a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, opening the asset to institutional and retail investors who can't or won't hold ZEC directly through a wallet. That would put Zcash in rare company alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as cryptocurrencies with dedicated US ETF access, a milestone that seemed unlikely even a year ago given regulators' historical wariness toward privacy-preserving crypto assets.
