Bitcoin maximalist and JAN3 head Samson Mow has publicly challenged the sustainability of Zcash's current parabolic rally. Commenting on the ZEC/USDT chart, where the coin corrected to $1,300 after recently surging to a peak near $1,600, Mow focused on the asset's year-to-date performance.
He said the privacy coin's market capitalization had been artificially inflated and that the market faced an inevitable return to the mean.
What Bitcoin maximalists think is wrong with Zcash
In Mow's view, there simply isn't enough speculative capital in the market to keep Zcash among the top 10 cryptocurrencies at a valuation above $22 billion after its rise of more than 1,000% since the start of the year.
JAN3's head and other Bitcoin proponents traditionally view projects like this as redundant. They argue that Bitcoin layer-2 solutions, such as the Lightning Network, already provide the necessary level of privacy.
Among ZEC's main fundamental flaws, maximalists point to the historical "dev tax," high fund fees (2.5% at Grayscale) and the overall centralization of its governance. They also cite past staffing crises at Electric Coin Company. The criticism comes amid Mow's own ambitious forecast: drawing on its internal OMEGA60 model and algorithms such as Power Law, his company expects Bitcoin to reach $1 million around 2028–2033.
From this perspective, diverting liquidity to altcoins is considered strategically unwise, since sovereign adoption could push BTC to that level significantly faster than the models predict.
Zcash supporters, however, attribute the coin's current 1,077% gain over the past 12 months to real infrastructure changes that run counter to their critics' skepticism. On October 4–5, developers activated the NU7 upgrade on testnet, which is expected to make block generation three times faster.
ZEC's liquidity has also been supported by the recent launch of pools on THORChain and a $306 million inflow into Grayscale's spot ETF, although the fund recorded its first major outflow this week, at $93 million.
This technological optimism is now clashing with regulatory pressure. The coming weeks will show whether the coin can hold in the $1,280–$1,330 range or whether the market will prove the maximalists right and trigger a major correction in the rally.
