Zcash climbed about 64% in a week and touched an eight-year high near $850. Most of the coverage stopped there. The filing behind the rally is Grayscale's fifth amended application for a Zcash ETF, and it carries a number nobody put on the front page: a 2.5% annual sponsor fee, paid in ZEC, accruing every day.
That is the most expensive crypto fund fee I can find on a US exchange. It is worth sitting with for a second.
Ten times what a Bitcoin fund charges
When the spot Bitcoin ETFs launched, fee compression was the whole story. BlackRock's IBIT and Fidelity's FBTC settled at 0.25%. Bitwise came in at 0.20%. Grayscale's own Mini Trust undercut all of them at 0.15%. The one holdout was GBTC, the converted legacy trust, still charging 1.5% and still pulling in more fee revenue than every rival combined.
Grayscale's proposed Zcash ETF, ticker ZCSH, would charge more than even that.
| Fund | Annual fee |
|---|---|
| Grayscale Zcash (proposed) | 2.50% |
| Grayscale GBTC | 1.50% |
| BlackRock IBIT | 0.25% |
| Fidelity FBTC | 0.25% |
| Bitwise BITB | 0.20% |
| Grayscale Mini (BTC) | 0.15% |
A gap like this compounds. On a $100,000 position held for a few years, the distance between 0.2% and 2.5% is thousands of dollars that never touch your ZEC. Grayscale can price this way for the same reason GBTC still can. For now it would be the only regulated Zcash wrapper on a US exchange, and captive demand does not shop on price. Zcash already carries a concentration problem on the mining side. This adds one on the cost side.
DCG sits on both sides of the trade
The filing spends pages on a conflict most readers will never reach. Digital Currency Group, Grayscale's parent, discussed contributing roughly 200,000 ZEC into the trust. Under a June 30 snapshot that hypothetical stake works out to about 34% of the fund, and the filing's own math reaches 44.3% of the enlarged trust once related-party shares are counted. Grayscale warns, in its own words, that DCG could own a majority and control the trust's limited shareholder votes.
So the sponsor collecting 2.5% and the largest shareholder voting the fund could sit inside one corporate family. Coinbase Custody holds the coins and BNY Mellon acts as transfer agent, yet the economics point back to a single owner. That kind of structural quirk has surfaced at Grayscale before. The firm pulled three altcoin ETFs days before new rules landed earlier this year rather than reshape them.
700 days under NAV is the track record
Grayscale had to disclose how its Zcash trust has actually traded since 2021, and the range is wide. The average premium ran 53%. The average discount ran 19%. At the extremes the trust traded 240% above the value of its coins, then 55% below it. It closed under net asset value on 700 separate days.
Conversion to an ETF is meant to fix precisely that, by letting authorized participants arbitrage the gap away. It worked for GBTC, whose long discount closed after it converted. Whether the same holds for a thinner altcoin fund charging five times an IBIT-style fee is the open part. Traders have watched premium-to-NAV math punish holders before, most recently when Twenty One Capital's premium fell to 1.07x and erased $413 million in paper value.
The Zcash ETF may well launch. ZEC is the twelfth-largest coin now, the existing trust already holds more than $260 million, and a fifth amendment usually means the SEC's remaining questions are close to answered. What buyers should weigh before that day is the fee, because at 2.5% this Zcash ETF would cost more to hold than any crypto fund trading on a US exchange.
