코인톡

Now that I’m finally ready to walk away from the Zcash chart, let me walk you through my nearly year long trade. Hopefully you learn something about how to manage conviction and risk.

Mid Jul 2025: @kelxyz_ invited me to a pitch dinner where everybody was supposed to share a fun trade idea and all debate them. I wanted to do a good job so I spent a lot of time researching the market, specifically assets over $1B because it would’ve felt sus to suggest something smaller. That’s when I noticed Monero was actually the top large asset YTD. This piqued my interest in privacy as an emerging narrative and I tweeted about it July 11th without taking a position personally.

> I think this teaches the value of always looking for new trends and ideas. I had been ruminating and monitoring the privacy thesis for 3 months before ever even buying Zcash. Research and work you do in a bear market converts to profits in a bull market.

October 1 2025: I saw @mert bull posting Zcash and meme’d that I wasn’t gonna copy trade him. Later that night I realized I was being stupid. Zcash overlapped with my growing conviction in privacy and I shouldn’t fade a good chart just because Mert was tweeting about it. As @IvanOnTech says, “respect all pumps”. I bought zec and went on a rampage to build as much conviction in the coin as I could

> I think this teaches the importance of avoiding “right thesis, wrong coin”. The best traders I know respect the charts. You should have a healthy reverence for the market. when it moves in unexpected ways, your first duty is to give it the benefit of the doubt and re-evaluate your initial assumptions. This applies on the way up and on the way down.

I then spent all of October bull posting & arguing with as many accounts as possible. This is an essential part of my personal approach to building conviction. CT has the brightest minds in my opinion, the fact we can all debate in public and you have reach beyond the size of your own account is awesome.

> I think this shows the importance of engaging on this platform. I love 100k follower accounts as much as I love 100 follower accounts. I try my best to reply to as many good-faith non-bot comments as humanly possible because I want everybody to know I’m an account inclined to reply to you and engage in discourse.

October 30, 2025: I called Zcash would flip Hyperliquid, despite everybody coming out of the woodwork to clown me, this happened Nov 7-8ish for a brief moment.

> I think this shows the importance of remembering your duty as a trader is to yourself. At that moment in time it was wrong to be married to hyperliquid bags. In other moments it’s wrong to be married to zcash bags. I guess there’s even times where it’s bad to be married to Bitcoin. DO NOT become a community member ever. *if you’re a trader, if you’re an investor it’s different.

Nov 7, 2025: Zcash had just flipped Hyperliquid and I was up ~6x. The position was reaching a point where I couldn’t focus on anything else, I could feel my own euphoria. I forget who, but somebody shared @blknoiz06 's beautiful Feb 17, 2021 thread about how to sell parabolic moves. I overlayed his parabola indicator on the zec chart and it was a perfect fit, time to sell. I sold roughly half the position to lock in profits and cold stored the other half as a zero-cost basis moon bag given I still believed in the fundamentals of Zcash and was willing to ride a potential downturn. This turned out to be a perfect sale at the top

> I think this shows the importance of managing your own emotions and using the sell button maturely. You don’t have to full stack buy and full stack sell. When a position runs up like crazy, you can sell a portion of the position that brings some sanity back to your life. I find realizing PnL almost always clears my head. Am I so happy with these dollars that I want to sell more? Am I having fomo such that I should buy back in? Am I happy with this new size?

> In my opinion having a mature relationship with the buy/sell button - don’t buy or sell all at once, learn to scale in and out with rising and falling conviction - is the single greatest way to improve your trading ability.

Through the end of 2025 and into 2026 I would talk about Zcash a little but mostly to affirm I like the coin & thesis but am being patient.

> Obviously this shows the importance of being patient when you have real belief

April 4th 2026: I noticed a bunch more concerning government regulation; conscriptions, wealth taxes, and ai surveillance. Bitcoin looked like it was starting an uptrend, everybody was buying the Hyperliquid dip, and the Zcash chart had a beautiful rounded bottom. So I longed more on perps. The best thing I did in this window of trading was consistently taking profits into spot positions (mostly HYPE but some additional ZEC too). I did not capture the full move from $250 to $700 on leverage but I was able to acquire a bunch of HYPE (that I still hold now) and modestly grow my ZEC bag.

> Candidly I’m less inclined to recommend people trade as actively as I was during this time period but I felt there was edge in my ability to get bullish for the mini-alt cycle before everybody else, and I had confidence in my own ability to consistently lock in profits to avoid getting over my skis. Perhaps it’s worth noting that my trading Style in this April - June 2026 cycle was much more active than my trading patterns October - November 2025. I think there’s something to be said about knowing when to buy & hold vs actively trade in and out of a position. There’s a time and place for both.

June 3 2026: ZODL posted a post mortem of the Orchard Vulnerability. Two things immediately stuck out to me
1. within 48 hours they had censored orchard transactions with a softfork and pushed a hardfork through the network. No matter what anybody says, I interpret that as a high level of centralization. That’s bad with respect to the “Zcash is a viable alternative to Bitcoin” thesis
2. the blog was being cheeky with their language around the vulnerability. “shielded pool soundness vulnerability” and “In this case, successful exploitation could have allowed the Orchard pool to accept invalid state transitions, potentially affecting the pool's accounting guarantees.” both struck me as ways to avoid saying, we found a double-spend vulnerability (worst case scenario).

I got to work with ChatGPT trying to make sense of what I was reading, seeing if I could validate my level of concern. Between my own technical experience and an assessment from ChatGPT, I felt comfortable posting and raising my concern. Much of the Zcash community and even ZODL leadership went to war in my replies. Despite everything they said, I remained unconvinced this wasn’t a big problem so I went on stream to lay out what I still believe to be a fair assessment of the situation.

^ Let me address another thing here. [centralization concerns aside] It doesn’t matter to the perspective of the market that the inability to audit these pools has always been there (vulnerability or not). What matters is that most people buying zec didn’t understand this dynamic, myself included. Fwiw I consider myself in the top 99.9% of crypto and technical knowledge, if I don’t understand it, nobody else does either. The market was going to have to price in this new risk.

These compounding factors gave me confidence to completely flip a large long position to a large short position. I had edge because I understood something better than most participants in the market.

> I’m so proud of this trade. It represents so many traits of what I think make me a good trader
1. It relies on real technical understanding to build an opinion quicker than others
2. It relies on an accurate vibes based read on my fellow market participants
3. It relies on trading discipline to be able to so rapidly invert a position I had been loud and public about in the past
**Btw all of these traits are things you can develop.

June 4 2026: Zooko posted his blog, I collected flowers from my clip, and I closed the short. From my perspective Zooko’s blog was incredible. He addressed the reality of the situation with honesty, candor, and a forward looking plan. He did not invalidate the concerns of anybody or try to sugarcoat the situation, all while keeping a cool head. I have an incredible amount of respect for Zooko personally and the Zcash project in general.

That said, the blog was my signal to close the trade. I believed I had unique edge in my understanding of the situation and Zooko’s blog addressed the situation with such honesty, it seemed like the market had caught up to me and my edge had eroded. My trade was officially over from my perspective.

> In retrospect I could have held the short longer but it’s so hard to trade when you’re the center of attention on ct. there’s nothing like it. You get completely trapped in a bubble where your entire timeline is engaging with you, it makes it seem like your trade is much more consensus than it is in reality. My respect for big accounts like @notthreadguy and many others who trade in public has gone up tremendously.

Looking forward I do see a path where ZCash can come back stronger than ever. They’re developing new cryptographic primitives and working on formal verification to give provable assurances of solvency, I hope they win. Privacy is a fundamental human right and we’re lucky so many people are passionately working on it. Remember that Solana had to suffer years of crashes & instability to finally be ready for its time in the sun during the memecoin mania. That’s not to say ZCash is a guaranteed winner anymore (it never was) but it is to say I don’t think it’s worth zero.

However I will be stepping away from the Zcash chart and watching from the sidelines for a while. My emotions are so high on this asset that I don’t feel I can trade it effectively without some time to cool off. Instead there’s other coins and narratives inside of crypto I find interesting now +plus stuff in TradFi like AI Pharma! I’m going to hang this chart on my wall and move on to new trades.

- Tulip King 🌷👑❤️