$ZEN was still hailed yesterday as a dark horse in the privacy track, but it dropped 13% in just one day, crashing from $13 to $11.3. Watching the market sentiment weaken, retail investors are cutting losses, while institutions are quietly moving—Grayscale has silently accumulated nearly one million ZEN, accounting for over 5% of the circulating supply.

This phenomenon is quite interesting. In simple terms, it is a true reflection of market divergence: retail focuses on the ups and downs of the K-line, while institutions are still adding chips to their baskets. The underlying logical differences go far beyond just psychology.

Retail investors are easily frightened by daily chart-level fluctuations, whereas institutions hold a set of "tolerance systems." This system is not some mystical technique nor solely supported by faith, but a mechanism that allows assets to continuously generate returns amid bull and bear transitions and market volatility.

The core idea is: maximize capital efficiency so that assets no longer depend on the rise and fall of a single coin. No matter how sideways your BNB or ETH are, they can continuously generate cash flow. This is the confidence that allows institutions to dare to go against the trend.

Therefore, while discussing ZEN or other privacy coins, understanding foundational protocols like ListaDAO becomes especially important. It’s not about abandoning narratives or chasing trends, but about adding a "buffer" while pursuing them.

What ListaDAO does is quite straightforward—it is a DeFi protocol that integrates liquidity staking and interest-bearing stablecoins. This may not sound groundbreaking, but its design breaks the constraints of traditional staking models.

Traditional staking works like this: you lock your coins, wait for rewards, and liquidity is frozen. When can you use it? You have no idea. ListaDAO’s idea is to invert this model: your staked assets also earn a "liquidity twin." For example, if you stake BNB in this protocol, you not only earn staking rewards but also receive an lstBNB token as a liquidity certificate. This certificate can continue to circulate in the market and even be used to participate in other DeFi strategies.

In other words, your assets are "split" into two versions: one continuously generating returns in the background, and the other remaining liquid in the front, ready to be traded at any time. This is what is called an "asset productive state"—no longer a binary choice (hold or trade), but the benefit of having both simultaneously.

This logic is completely different for investors with different risk preferences.

For example, if you are an investor optimistic about the privacy coin track but somewhat uneasy about short-term volatility, the conventional approach is: pour money into ZEN, then either hold, cut losses, or repeatedly stop-loss. ListaDAO’s approach is on a different dimension: you can use the interest-bearing stablecoins generated from staking to implement low-risk yield strategies, while leaving the growth potential of your main assets to the long-term narrative of privacy coins. The asset structure becomes more flexible, and the returns more three-dimensional.

There are many protocols like this in the market, but ListaDAO’s advantage lies in its obsession with capital efficiency. It is not simply stacking features but designing systematically so that every asset works according to the investor’s intent. This system is especially useful in a bear market.

Returning to the story of ZEN, why does Grayscale dare to buy when everyone else is cutting losses? On one hand, it’s a long-term confidence in the privacy narrative; on the other hand, their cost structure and holdings are different. Their assets can generate cash flow in various market environments, so short-term price pain points are less deadly.

This is the fundamental difference between institutions and retail investors—not capital size, but asset productivity.