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When an Altcoin Rallies, Who Actually Makes Money? Zcash as the Case Study

A coin's price can multiply in weeks. Follow the money and you find the profit landing in some unexpected places, and leaving others fast.

3 min read

Cover card: When an Altcoin Rallies, Who Actually Makes Money? Zcash as the case study

Key takeaways

  • In a rally, early holders and the people selling picks and shovels (hardware, hosting) tend to do better than late buyers.
  • Mining profit spikes first, then gets competed away as more machines switch on and difficulty rises.
  • By the time a rally is in the headlines, the easy part is usually over.
  • If you trade rallies, decide your exit before you enter.

Every cycle has a coin that goes vertical. In 2026 one of them was Zcash (ZEC), a privacy coin that had spent years out of the headlines. By late August it was trading between roughly $820 and $871, Bitcoin.com News reported, and coverage elsewhere called it an eight-year high.

Rallies like that attract two kinds of attention: people who want to buy, and people who want to understand. This post is for the second group. If you trace where the money goes during a rally, you learn something that helps you in the next one.

Stop one: the holders who were already there

The first and largest winners in any rally are people who held the coin before it moved. They didn't need to time anything. The lesson here is obvious and still ignored: the big gains in a rally go to positions opened when nobody was talking about the coin. Buying after the headline means buying from those people.

Stop two: the miners, briefly

Zcash is mined with specialised machines, and when the coin's price jumps, each machine's output is suddenly worth far more. Bitcoin.com News estimated that a current Antminer Z15 Pro was earning around $35 a day in ZEC at those prices, with an older Z15 earning about half that.

So what happens? Idle machines get switched back on. Operators buy more. Hosting companies expand capacity for the relevant algorithm; OneMiners, for example, announced expanded Equihash hosting as Zcash demand climbed, and one listed operator told Bitcoin.com it had switched on 4.2 gigasols of Z15 Pro capacity in a single week.

And then the network does what networks do. Zcash's hashrate climbed to roughly 27 to 29 gigasols per second, near the highest level on record. More machines means each one earns a smaller share. The same article makes the point plainly: machines come back online when revenue beats power costs, and that continues until rising difficulty eats the extra margin.

Miners do make money in a rally. They make the most of it early, and the window narrows as everyone else arrives.

Stop three: picks and shovels

The steadiest profits in any rush go to whoever sells the tools. During the Zcash run, the newest ASIC for its algorithm was listed at $4,999 and sold out at the manufacturer, pushing individual buyers to secondhand markets at whatever price sellers chose. Hardware makers, resellers and hosting providers get paid whether or not the coin holds its price afterwards. That's not a criticism; it's just where the risk sits. The tool seller is paid up front. The tool buyer is betting on the future.

Stop four: the late buyer

Last to the party is the person who saw the chart on social media and bought at the top. They might still do fine if the rally continues. But they're buying from the early holders who are selling, competing with miners who are now producing more coins to sell, and paying a price that already includes everyone else's optimism. That's a hard position, and most people who end up in it didn't decide to be there. They just didn't decide anything.

What a trader takes from this

  1. Know which stop you're at. If the coin is already in the headlines, you're at stop four. That doesn't mean don't trade it; it means size the position like you're late, because you are.
  2. Watch hashrate as well as price. For mined coins, a vertical hashrate chart tells you the mining margin is being competed away. It also tells you miners will have more coins to sell.
  3. Decide the exit first. A rally that goes up 500 percent can give half of it back in days. A stop-loss placed before you enter is the simplest defence against turning a win into a loss.
  4. Separate the trade from the thesis. "Privacy coins are undervalued" might be true for years. "ZEC will be higher next week" is a different claim, and it's the one you're actually betting on.

None of this says Zcash was a bad buy or a good one. It says that a rally is a transfer of money between groups, and the most useful thing you can know is which group you're in.

Sources

Disclosure: the author works with OneMiners, a crypto mining hosting provider. This isn't a paid placement, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy hardware or hosting.

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