The listing on NYSE Arca makes the fund the first U.S. spot vehicle built around a privacy-focused digital asset. Whether it holds any of Zcash’s privacy-protected coins, or only the transparent ones, isn’t addressed in Grayscale’s own filing language.
Grayscale’s Zcash Trust began trading on NYSE Arca today under the ticker ZCSH, converting an existing, roughly $260 million over-the-counter trust holding an estimated 391,000 to 393,000 ZEC into an exchange-listed fund. The listing makes it the first U.S. spot exchange-traded product built around a privacy-focused digital asset.
The fund’s fee is set at 2.5% annually, roughly ten times the 0.25% charged by BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust. Custody runs through Coinbase Custody, with BNY Mellon administering the fund and standard sanctions and know-your-customer screening applied to redemptions and deliveries. The listing proceeded through S-3 registration-statement effectiveness, a procedural mechanism, rather than a discrete SEC approval order.
Zcash’s defining feature is a shielded-transaction pool that hides the sender, receiver and amount of a transaction; most ZEC in circulation sits in transparent addresses that function like a conventional public ledger. Trade publication CryptoSlate has argued the fund’s custody arrangement makes it “almost certain” Coinbase Custody will hold only transparent-address ZEC, reasoning that shielded transactions lack the audit trail traditional compliance screens require. That is the outlet’s own inference. Grayscale’s S-3 filing does not itself specify which form of ZEC the fund will hold or exclude.
The launch resolves whether a privacy-coin ETF can list in the United States. It does not yet resolve whether owning shares in one delivers any of the privacy Zcash was built to provide.