Zcash Fear and Greed Index
What's driving the score
Seven weighted inputs, tuned for Zcash. Each market signal is ranked against its own trailing year, so the score reflects how unusual today is for ZEC specifically. Alongside the classic signals, the index watches what makes ZEC unique: flows into and out of the shielded pools.
Historical sentiment
How the index has moved over time. Extremes tend to be more informative than the mid-range: sustained fear often marks accumulation zones, sustained greed marks froth. On multi-year views the bold line is a smoothed trend and the faint line behind it is the raw daily reading — hover or tap any point for that day’s exact score and ZEC price.
How it works
Data collection
Every few hours we pull a full year of ZEC price and volume history, community sentiment, search trending status, market dominance, and on-chain shielded pool balances.
Sentiment analysis
Each input is ranked as a percentile against its own trailing year, so the index measures how unusual today is for ZEC — not just its raw level. Volatility and volume are read directionally: heavy activity in an uptrend is euphoria, the same activity in a downtrend is panic.
Index calculation
The weighted composite lands between 0 (Extreme Fear) and 100 (Extreme Greed). Weights are renormalized across whichever inputs have data, so a warming-up component never drags the score toward neutral.
Methodology
Most sentiment indices are built from hand-tuned thresholds — someone decides that "5% above the moving average" equals a score of 70. This index takes a different approach: every market signal is expressed as a percentile rank against ZEC's own trailing year. A momentum reading of 96 means today's momentum is stronger than 96% of days in the past year — calibrated to how Zcash actually behaves, not to arbitrary constants. This also guarantees the full 0–100 range gets used: extremes read as extremes.
Two signals are read directionally: elevated volatility and volume during an uptrend register as euphoria, while identical activity during a downtrend registers as panic. The direction blends smoothly with trend strength, so a flat market doesn't whipsaw between the two. And when a component lacks data (a newly warming-up input, a failed source), its weight is redistributed across the components that do have data — a missing input never drags the score toward a false neutral.
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Momentum | 22% | Blended 7/30/90-day returns, percentile-ranked vs the trailing year |
| Price Position | 20% | Where price sits in its 1-year range (log-scaled) |
| Shielded Pool Flows | 15% | Week-over-week net flow into Zcash's shielded pools — on-chain conviction, unique to ZEC |
| Volatility | 13% | 14-day realized volatility percentile, signed by trend direction |
| ZEC Dominance | 12% | ZEC's share of total crypto market cap vs its own history |
| Volume | 10% | 7-day volume percentile, signed by trend direction |
| Social Sentiment | 8% | Community bullish votes, boosted when ZEC trends in search |
Backtested against a decade of ZEC
The formula was validated against daily ZEC data back to 2016. Here is what it would have read at the moments that mattered:
| Date | Event | ZEC | Index |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 16, 2025 | All-time-high blow-off top | $697 | 99 — Extreme Greed |
| May 7, 2021 | 2021 cycle peak | $319 | 94 — Extreme Greed |
| Mar 13, 2020 | COVID crash | $28 | 5 — Extreme Fear |
| Jun 2022 | LUNA / 3AC capitulation | $59 | 15 — Extreme Fear |
| Nov 9, 2022 | FTX collapse | $35 | 16 — Extreme Fear |
| Dec 2018 | Bear market bottom | $50 | 14 — Extreme Fear |
Backtest covers the four price/volume components (65% of index weight, renormalized); social, dominance, and shielded data are not available historically. Percentile windows are strictly backward-looking — no hindsight is baked in.
Honest limitations. ZEC's history skews fearful — the coin spent most of 2017–2024 in decline, so roughly half of all historical readings land in Fear territory. That is the data being honest, not a miscalibration. The index is a snapshot of crowd emotion, most informative at its extremes; it is not a trading signal, and past sentiment patterns do not predict future prices.
About the index
The Zcash Fear and Greed Index is an analytical tool designed to gauge the prevailing sentiment among ZEC investors and traders. Like its Bitcoin and Ethereum counterparts, it distills emotion from many noisy sources — volatility, trading volumes, community sentiment, and search interest — into a single score from 0 (Extreme Fear) to 100 (Extreme Greed).
Zcash gets one signal the others can't offer: shielded pool flows. When holders move ZEC into the shielded pool, coins tend to leave exchanges and go quiet — behavior historically associated with long-term conviction. Sustained unshielding toward exchanges can signal the opposite. The index treats net shielding as a conviction input alongside the classic market signals.
Periods of fear often correlate with market lows and potential accumulation opportunities, while periods of greed can mark local tops and suggest caution. The index is a snapshot of crowd emotion, not a trading signal on its own — it's most useful at the extremes, and in combination with your own research.