Grayscale filed a fifth amended registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The move pushes its bid to convert the existing Zcash Trust into a spot ETF one step closer to reality. The fund would trade on NYSE Arca if approved.
The S-3 filing, dated Aug. 21, 2026, designates “The Zcash ETF” as the proposed fund name and assigns it the ticker ZCH, per the filing. In practical terms, the trust has traded over the counter since 2017. Conversion would mean shares issued and redeemed at a price tied directly to spot ZEC, not at a premium or discount to NAV. The sponsor fee sits at an annual rate of 2.5%.
What the latest amendment changes
Service providers get named in this version. The Bank of New York Mellon would handle transfer agent duties. Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC would serve as custodian. Grayscale stated in the filing that “the Trust intends to issue Shares on a continuous basis and is registering an indeterminate number of Shares.”
Earlier in the week, a separate fourth amendment disclosed that a Digital Currency Group subsidiary was in discussions to contribute roughly 200,000 ZEC to the fund. Grayscale is a DCG subsidiary. The contribution would seed the ETF’s creation basket.
That disclosure is new ground. Prior amendments had not identified a prospective seed contributor, and it narrows the gap between the trust’s current structure and the in-kind creation-and-redemption model the firm’s already-approved spot products use.
The approval playbook
This filing covers the registration side of a two-track process. Grayscale has launched over a dozen crypto ETFs, including bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and XRP funds. Each one required both an S-1 or S-3 registration statement and a separate exchange rule-change filing under SEC Rule 19b-4 before the product could list. The Block’s reporting does not specify the status of the parallel 19b-4 filing for the Zcash product.
Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst James Seyffart posted on X on Friday: “Looks like they’re getting closer and closer to converting this thing into an ETF.” Seyffart did not forecast a decision date.
Scale of the existing product
The Zcash Trust held over $260 million in assets under management as of Friday, The Block reported, citing the firm’s own disclosures. Zcash ranks as the 12th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization on The Block’s data page. The network launched in 2016, designed around privacy-preserving transactions.
A green light from the SEC would produce the first spot Zcash ETF in the United States. Whether the commission extends the precedent it set with bitcoin and ether to a privacy coin is the open question. Regulators have historically scrutinized the asset class over traceability concerns. The filing does not address it. That silence is the gap.
