Monero (XMR) also has a weekly price increase, although much smaller.
In an increasingly controlled world, the market focuses on privacy.
Zcash (ZEC) and dash (DASH), two cryptocurrencies focused on user privacy, are today, April 13, 2026, among the 4 digital assets with the best weekly performance in the market. This advance highlights the interest of investors in the segment of confidentiality-oriented currencies.
From April 7 to 13, ZEC registers a price increase of 42%, while DASH of 33.35%.
For its part, monero (XMR), the most valuable coin in the privacy coin niche, with a market capitalization of $6.3 billionalso recorded an increase in the same period, although more moderate, of 5.7%.
The advance of these assets occurs after the publication, on March 27, of a report by Grayscale titled “Zcash: financial privacy in the age of AI”. In it, the asset manager maintains that technological development can strain the confidentiality of the financial system and warns that the expansion of artificial intelligence “could generate similar challenges” to those previously caused by banking digitalization or the rise of the internet.
Within this framework, Grayscale suggests that, “in a world of AI-powered financial surveillance,” Zcash’s privacy features “could become essential,” in reference to its protected transactions, which use cryptographic proof to validate operations without publicly revealing the sender, recipient or amount transferred.
The report adds that “privacy is not a marginal characteristic of money”, but a structural part of its functioning, and supports this thesis with data from the network itself: as of March 16, 2026, 86.5% of Zcash transactions were carried out through its protected system.
Furthermore, he mentions that quantum computing represents a long-term risk for most public networks, and not a problem unique to Zcash. At this point, it stands out that Electric Coin Company, the firm historically linked to the development of Zcash, has already incorporated quantum resilience as a line of work in its roadmapsuggesting that the issue ceased to be an abstract hypothesis and became a concrete design consideration.
It should be noted that the firm has a direct interest in the asset. Grayscale manages the Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC) and on November 26, 2025, it submitted an application to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to list an exchange-traded fund (ETF) based on zcash, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
Grayscale’s Zcash-focused report also appears to have extended interest to other privacy-linked cryptocurrencies, such as DASH.
In your case, the greater rise against Monero can be explained by its lower market capitalizationwhich allows generating greater profits with relatively lower capital flows.
It should be noted that DASH has an optional privacy scheme, through the PrivateSend function, which facilitates its presence on exchanges and reduces part of the regulatory frictions.
In addition to the occasional interest in the privacy coin segment, the performance of this asset class is also supported by the strength of bitcoin (BTC).
When the most valuable currency has an outstanding performance, it usually improves the general perception of the market and favors a rotation of capital towards assets of lower capitalization and greater volatility.
As CriptoNoticias has reported, BTC remains above $70,000 amid renewed escalation of tensions in the Middle East after the failure of talks between the United States and Iran. In this context, Washington moved forward with a naval blockade on Iranian ports and oil once again exceeded $100 per barrel. This is a context that raised risk aversion in traditional markets, but did not prevent BTC from remaining on that key support.