Zcash (ZEC) is one of the cryptocurrencies that has increased the most in price in the last 12 months.
For Balchunas, bitcoin (BTC) is at a crucial moment.
Eric Balchunas, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, warned that zcash (ZEC), a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, is capable of taking away attention or capital that is currently allocated to bitcoin (BTC).
“Zcash has the air of third party candidates, like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. It seems that it is better to incorporate their ideas into the main party rather than splitting the vote, which could have important consequences,” he says.
It is worth clarifying that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were presidential candidates from minority parties in the United States—the Libertarian and the Green—who, although they had no real chance of winning, could take votes away from the main parties.
Balchunas uses this comparison to explain that ZEC could play a similar role against bitcoin. According to him, It does not compete to lead the market, but it could divide the attention or interest that is focused on BTC today.
Likewise, the specialist think which is a “crucial moment for BTC”. Balchunas proposes that, although bitcoin and zcash are different projects, some zcash privacy ideas could be incorporated in a regulated way into BTC to prevent market interest from fragmenting.
In other words, he considers this a crucial moment for bitcoin because it is in a stage of institutional adoption and regulatory expansion, and any fragmentation of the ecosystem could influence its perception and investor confidence.
However, Balchunas’ error is in overestimating the performance of ZEC and comparing it with BTC.
It should be noted that zcash has become the fashionable altcoin thanks to its outstanding performance, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
In the last 12 months, ZEC increased 800%, as seen in the following graph:
It is just another altcoin, like so many that have already had their rise – and so many others that will still have it -, something that Balchunas perhaps ends up magnifying because he is not a specialist in BTC, but in ETFs. The analyst himself acknowledges this in his post by saying that “I’m just a fan of exchange-traded funds (ETFs).”