Zcash Short Trader Faces $7.66M Paper Loss as ZEC Nears $1,500

A Zcash trader who once won 26 trades in a row is now sitting on a $7.66 million unrealized loss after taking a heavily leveraged short position in ZEC as the privacy coin continued its rally.

The trade shows just how quickly gains from a strong run of successful positions can disappear when someone gets caught on the wrong side of a fast-moving market.

ZEC Rally Leaves Short Trader $7.66M Underwater

Lookonchain reported on September 18 that the trader had recorded an 89% win rate across 47 trades and made more than $9 million before the ZEC short erased those gains.

The current position is a 12,285 ZEC short worth around $18.3 million, with the trader facing liquidation if ZEC reaches about $1,551.

The position dashboard shows just under $1.8 million in account equity against the $18.3 million in total position value, with leverage at 10.82x. The trader has no free margin available, while the unrealized loss stands at $7.66 million. They opened their position at an average price of $867, compared with a mark price near $1,486.

The scale of the bet is notable when compared with the trader’s earlier results, which included profits of roughly $1.9 million on a Bitcoin long and $1.8 million on an Ethereum long, along with several profitable SOL and ZEC positions.

Yesterday, another well-known trader, Garret Jin, faced a paper loss above $26 million on a much larger short worth about $51.5 million, when Zcash touched a fresh 10-year high near $1,400 before pulling back to around $1,330.

ZEC Keeps Climbing

ZEC has since pushed higher again, trading a few dollars short of $1,500 at the time of writing, per CoinGecko data, up more than 10% over 24 hours and 39% in seven days.

The token has also jumped about 200% over 30 days and more than 2,800% in the last year. Some of that momentum traces back to a governance vote that cut Zcash’s block-target spacing from 75 seconds down to 25, and a handful of analysts at the time argued the coin was nowhere near done climbing.

Lookonchain also flagged newly created wallets pulling tens of millions of dollars worth of ZEC off exchanges in the past day or two, activity that tends to tighten supply rather than add to it.

Meanwhile, across the market, approximately $32.7 million in ZEC positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, and shorts accounted for the overwhelming majority of it, at $27.17 million.