A handful of high-profile investors have been buying Zcash and Hyperliquid lately.
Both coins have finite supplies that are being soaked up quickly.
Everyone loves the idea of buying a cryptocurrency early in its rise, alongside other smart-money investors. On that note, Zcash (CRYPTO: ZEC) and Hyperliquid (CRYPTO: HYPE) could both double by 2029, and a handful of famous investors already own both of them.
Still, both coins have delivered a couple of stomach-churning drops this year, not to mention their turbulent past. Let's analyze both to see whether they're worth buying, considering who holds them and what the coins are cooking up next.
Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »
Image source: Getty Images.
Zcash is a privacy coin, as its main appeal to users is its ability to optionally mask a transaction's sender, recipient, and amount.
It borrows heavily from Bitcoin's supply policy, including a fixed cap of 21 million coins and regular "halvings" that reduce its mining reward. So it's an appealing asset for both sound-money investors and those who want financial privacy.
In August, Grayscale Research proposed a bull case for the coin where it would hit $8,100 by 2030 if its market cap reaches 10% of that of Bitcoin, up from about 1.3% as of Oct. 6. To double, Zcash would need about 2.6% of Bitcoin's market cap, assuming Bitcoin holds steady, so it can underperform Grayscale's estimate by quite a bit and still make for a great investment for those who buy it now.
One major player that favors Zcash is Winklevoss Capital, the firm of the Winklevoss twins, who are known for being early investors in Bitcoin.
The firm put $58.9 million into Cypherpunk Technologies, a digital asset treasury (DAT) that buys and hoards Zcash, in November 2025, with Tyler Winklevoss calling Zcash "encrypted Bitcoin."
Naval Ravikant, an early investor in Uber Technologies and other tech companies, called Zcash "insurance against Bitcoin" in October 2025.
Nobody knows for sure whether Zcash can actually zoom over the long term, but so far, it's being adopted at a quick pace, which suggests at least some of the bullish predictions about its price will come true.
Hyperliquid is a specialized blockchain that's used as a decentralized exchange (DEX). Its most traded assets are perpetual futures, which are derivative contracts that never expire.
The factor that makes the coin worth buying is that 99% of the protocol fees that traders incur on the exchange are used to fund HYPE buybacks. Per DefiLlama, its annualized revenue was near $710 million as of Oct. 6, so it's expected to continue to perform a tremendous amount of repurchasing activity over time.
And with a real reason to buy and hold the token, institutional players are fairly bullish about Hyperliquid.
In December 2025, Cantor Fitzgerald mapped out Hyperliquid's path to reaching a $200 billion valuation within a decade, which would imply a price of roughly $200 per token. It's now around $85. Hyperliquid Labs, the platform's developer, began unstaking 3.7 million HYPE, worth about $329 million, in early October 2026 for a private sale to an undisclosed institution. Those tokens could eventually reach the open market.
What's more, the famed Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office disclosed a $23 million stake in the company as of June 30. Jane Street, a major Wall Street market maker, also held $4.4 million of HYPE-focused crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as of June 30, per 13F filings.
Aside from the coin's price potentially being boosted by institutional investors buying in, the next phase of Hyperliquid's growth will be driven largely by its users.
The platform lets anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE launch their own perpetual futures markets, and Hyperliquid is testing the same model for its prediction markets as well. Aside from the process creating a lot of demand for the coin, it'll also allow the platform's users to take on the financial risk of offering new markets for trading (and generating transaction fees for buybacks) rather than that risk being shouldered by Hyperliquid itself.
Even if that falls short of driving it to double in the next few years, it's still a very bullish setup for HYPE over the longer term.
Before you buy stock in Zcash, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Zcash wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $379,123!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,408,822!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 950% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 215% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of October 10, 2026.
Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin, Hyperliquid, and Zcash. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and Hyperliquid. The Motley Fool recommends Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.