ZEC Rallies 20% After Cypherpunk Reports First Annual Profit

Zcash (ZEC) surged as much as 20% on Monday evening, March 16 — spiking from $231 to as high as $284 — after ZEC digital asset treasury (DAT) firm Cypherpunk Technologies (Nasdaq: CYPH) released its full-year 2025 financial results showing a swing to profitability.

ZEC remains up roughly 9% on the day as of press time today, March 17, trading over $270, making it the top performer among the top-100 large-cap crypto assets, per CoinGecko data.

ZEC’s rally over the past 24 hours appears to be driven by Cypherpunk’s positive financials for 2025, which is the year the company rebranded from a biotech firm to a Zcash-focused DAT. Per the release, Cypherpunk reported net income of $4.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, a dramatic reversal from a net loss of $67.8 million in 2024.

According to the firm, the turnaround was driven by $50.4 million in unrealized gains on the fair value of its ZEC treasury holdings, marked to market at period end, Dec. 31. At that time, ZEC was trading near $530 and those holdings were valued at $147.4 million on its balance sheet, according to the firm’s press release.

Shares of CYPH also rallied yesterday and today, and are currently up over 13% today at nearly $0.80, and up over 40% in the past five days, per Yahoo Finance data.

Biotech to DAT Pivot

Cypherpunk was launched in mid-November last year and is backed by Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and the firm is the only publicly traded focused on Zcash.

Like several other DATs that launched last year as the experimental strategy exploded into a trend, Cypherpunk pivoted to a DAT via a rebrand from an entirely different industry, namely biotech. The company’s biotech past as Leap Therapeutics still shows up in the books, and the release notes that R&D expenses for what is now the company’s subsidiary fell by more than half last year from the previous year, which also helped it achieve net income.

Buying High, Reporting Profitable

As The Defiant previously reported last month, ZEC had fallen more than 50% since Cypherpunk’s last disclosed purchase on Dec. 30, 2025, when the company added 56,418 ZEC at around $514 per token.

According to the release, total holdings now stand at 294,743.10 ZEC at an average purchase price of $335.89 per token — about 19% higher than current prices, meaning the treasury remains underwater on a cost basis.

Still, Monday’s move suggests markets read the first-ever profit report as a validation of the DAT model applied to ZEC.

ZEC was the top-performing large-cap crypto asset of the year, as The Defiant previously reported, having surged more than 800% over the course of 2025.

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency, which is the second-largest privacy coin by market cap after Monero (XMR), began its extended price rally in the fall, starting in early September. The timing coincided roughly with the Winklevoss’ investment into Leap.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.