Behind ZEC's market capitalization of 10 billion: How much can market makers still earn?

Recently, ZEC has become popular again, with a circulating market capitalization of 8.4 billion and a total market capitalization of 10 billion, looking very promising. But I want to ask a heart-wrenching question: how many people really want to deeply understand the underlying logic of this project?

The Truth Behind the Turnover Rate of Data

Let's first look at the most intuitive data:

• Contract transaction volume of 3.7 billion, open position of 257 million - this turnover rate is ridiculously high.
• The spot trading volume is approaching 1 billion, with 1.82 million ZEC traded.
• Dropped from a high of 740 to 430, then pulled back to 740, the entire cycle took only 15 days.

What does this mean? The market turnover is extremely frequent, mainly due to continuous selling pressure. Although the market makers have invested heavily, each round of price increase is consuming the enthusiasm for the chips.

The Triple Dilemma After a Market Capitalization of 10 Billion

1. The cost of pulling the market has increased exponentially.

Raising the price by 10% requires hundreds of millions to billions in buy orders, because:

• The exchange depth deepens as the price rises.
• Medium-term holders find it easier to reduce their positions during an uptrend.
• The higher you go, the larger the sell orders you need to absorb.

Simple ignition is no longer effective; it requires continuous real capital.

2. The “eating orders” become ineffective after liquidity expansion

The larger the market capitalization, the more three problems encountered:

• The trading volume on the exchange has surged.
• Arbitrageurs and quantitative funds have begun to intervene.
• The influence of large orders on prices has decreased.

The result is that the difficulty of the increase multiplies, and the required funds also increase exponentially.

3. The quality of the counterparty has been upgraded.

It is no longer a simple game of retail investors vs. big players:

• The quantitative fund discovered ZEC fluctuations → directly shorting, offsetting spot volatility through perpetual contracts, siphoning off profits from the market makers.
• Cross-exchange arbitrage will sell the price back.
• Large fund short selling attack

The larger the market capitalization, the easier it is to become a short target. Institutions will track large holding addresses on-chain, assess the identity of operators and the potential for growth. This game is no longer a situation where one person wins.

Privacy Coin Attributes: From Gimmick to Ceiling

What can ZEC do? Based on a fork of the Bitcoin code, it hides the transaction parties, recipients, and amounts through zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs). It sounds cool, but the reality is more heartbreaking:

The biggest beneficiaries of this feature are the black and gray industrial chains.

ZEC can never achieve compliance. Just think about the fate of mixers. When a project that is clearly difficult to comply with suddenly surges explosively, there is only one purpose: harvest.

The Harshest Truth

Using project hype to attract retail investors → completing chip exchange → capital withdrawal → regulatory arrival.

The crypto world is full of stories, BTC is also a story, but the story of ZEC has already reached its conclusion. The attributes of privacy coins make compliance impossible, and it is inevitable that investors will withdraw in the future, with regulation being fate.

It's not about criticizing this project, but rather saying that the rules of this game determined its outcome from the very beginning.