Zcash Investment Calculator
What would buying ZEC have been worth? Pick a plan and a start date and this replays it against real daily Zcash closes.
What ZEC actually did, in the data this page replays
Measured from the 2,734 daily closes this page replays — 21 March 2019 to 13 September 2026, from Binance. Figures are bounded by that window, not by the asset’s whole life.
| History available | 7 years and 6 months (from Binance) |
|---|---|
| Bought on the first day, held to the last | 20.59× |
| Highest close in this window | $1,244.28 on 9 September 2026 |
| Where it sits against that high | 8.8% below |
| Deepest fall | −94.3%, 7 May 2021 → 5 July 2024 |
| Time to get back to that peak | 16 months after the low — 26 October 2025 |
| Separate falls of 50% or more | 3 |
| Days spent more than 20% below a previous peak | 90% |
| Best calendar year | 2025: +780% |
| Worst calendar year | 2022: -75.2% |
| Annualised volatility | 112.8% |
ZEC year by year
First close to last close each year. 2019 and 2026 are partial — the data starts mid-2019 and 2026 is still running.
| Year | Change | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | -50.1% | partial year |
| 2020 | +127.7% | |
| 2021 | +158.8% | |
| 2022 | -75.2% | worst full year |
| 2023 | -27.6% | |
| 2024 | +102.6% | |
| 2025 | +780% | best full year |
| 2026 | +115.8% | partial year |
The part the calculator does not show you
Held from the first day in this data to the last, ZEC returned 20.59×. That headline is the easy part. The number underneath it is that the position spent 90% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak — so for most of the time you owned it, you were looking at a figure lower than one you had already seen.
The deepest fall took ZEC down 94.3%, from $320.01 on 7 May 2021 to $18.3 on 5 July 2024 — 3 years and 2 months of falling. Getting back to that peak took a further 16 months, reached on 26 October 2025. Add those together and the round trip was 4 years and 6 months — the length of time someone who bought at the top had to hold before they were merely even again.
112.8% annualised volatility is ordinary for a major crypto asset and still several times a stock index. All ZEC calculators →
Frequently asked questions
＋Would buying ZEC on the first day of this data and holding have made money?
Yes — 20.59× from 21 March 2019 to 13 September 2026. The figure is real but it is also the single luckiest entry available in this window, and it required holding through a fall of 94.3% on the way. Set the calculator to a date you might plausibly have chosen instead and the answer usually changes a great deal.
＋What is the worst ZEC has fallen?
94.3% in this data, from 7 May 2021 down to 5 July 2024 — 3 years and 2 months of falling. It took a further 16 months to get back to that peak, on 26 October 2025, so the full round trip was 4 years and 6 months. Bear in mind our ZEC series starts in 2019; a deeper fall before that date would not appear here.
＋How often does ZEC lose half its value?
3 separate falls of 50% or more appear in this data, and the position spent 90% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak. A drop of that size is not an exceptional event for this asset — it is a recurring feature of the record, which is the thing to size a position around.
＋What were ZEC's best and worst years?
2025 was the best at +780%, and 2022 the worst at -75.2%. The gap between those two is the reason a single average annual return is a poor description of this asset: almost nobody experiences the average, they experience one of the two extremes depending on when they bought.
＋Is 7 years and 6 months of data enough to trust this backtest?
Reasonably. 7 years and 6 months spans roughly one full cycle for ZEC — enough for the drawdown figure to mean something, not enough to call it a pattern. The assets here with a decade or more behind them support firmer conclusions.
What to keep in mind for ZEC
ZEC trades on privacy-regulation and exchange-listing news as much as on crypto beta, and has a history of long flat stretches broken by very fast repricings.
Fees are small in absolute terms; shielded transactions are heavier to construct than transparent ones but still cost far less than an Ethereum transaction.
A backtest is one path that already happened. It shows what this plan produced through the exact sequence of prices ZEC went through — not what a similar plan will produce through a sequence nobody has seen yet.