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

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.

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.