BorisBorissss

After falling almost by 10% compared to the maximum on Monday at $454, the price of Zcash (ZEC) managed to recover most of the losses, as the bulls managed to maintain the support level at $400. At the time of publication, the token was trading at $446, which is 10% more compared to the previous day and 45% above the December minimum. Nevertheless, the price of ZEC is still 38% below the maximum in November at $723. The increase in the Zcash rate was supported by multiple factors. Firstly, many analysts predict that in 2026 confidentiality will become one of the main priorities. Large companies, such as Grayscale, emphasize confidentiality as a key aspect of cryptocurrencies to watch. Secondly, the number of transactions with Zcash has grown to 30.6%, and the total value of the cryptocurrency has risen to $2.24 billion. Furthermore, the Zcash community hopes that the ZEC-ETF from Grayscale will be approved in the coming months. This could lead to an increase in institutional inflow of funds, which, in turn, could support the price of ZEC in the long-term perspective.

The virtual assistant ChatGPT has created the ideal cryptocurrency portfolio for the year 2026, which promises to be complex for the digital asset industry.
The chatbot suggests investing: 25% in bitcoins; 20% in ethers; 12% in Ondo Finance (ONDO); 12% in Chainlink (LINK); 10% in Celestia (TIA); 8% in Render (RNDR); 7% in Kaspa (KAS); 6% in Arbitrum (ARB).
Buying BTC and ETH carries the least risk and promises high returns, so the artificial intelligence's decision to invest 45% of capital in these coins is not surprising. However, with other virtual currencies, things are not so straightforward.

The wealthy trader announced a reward of $1 million for the return of the stolen Tether (USDT) stablecoins. The cryptocurrency trader fell victim to an attack involving a spoofed wallet address for storing digital assets. On December 19, he sent 50 USDT to verify his crypto wallet. The attacker noticed this, almost immediately generated a similar wallet address, and executed a spoofing scheme, completing a fraudulent transaction using a smart contract to make it appear in the block explorer in the list of operations performed by the real address of the trader. The trader showed carelessness and instead of his own address, copied the attacker’s address and sent almost 50 million USDT to his crypto wallet. After receiving the stablecoins, the criminal prudently converted them into Dai (DAI) coins so that Tether employees could not freeze them. Then he exchanged DAI for 16,690 ethers and laundered through the mixer Tornado Cash 16,680 ETH.

In November, the sales volume of NFTs reached the lowest monthly indicator, and the market capitalization of non-fungible tokens decreased by more than 66% compared to January's maximums. According to CryptoSlam, in November, NFT sales dropped to $320 million. This is almost half of the $629 million recorded in October. As a result, monthly volumes returned to a level not seen since September 2024, when this indicator amounted to $312 million. In December, the decline is likely to continue. At least, the first week of the month was weak — from December 1 to 7, NFT sales volume did not exceed $62 million, which is the lowest weekly indicator in 2025.

The report of the German non-commercial organization Laboratory of Blockchain Research, studying the application of modern technology for the benefit of society, assessed the impact of the growth of the popularity of tokenized gold on the existing system. According to the words of the co-founder of the laboratory Ingo Fiedler, as the demand for physical gold grows from both the state and private investors, existing platforms for trading gold, operating as a system of partial reservation with a high share of borrowed funds, may crumble under the weight of physical deliveries. Fiedler believes that tokenized gold could pose a structural threat to the modern gold establishment, as it will undoubtedly attract more investors due to its trading advantages and safety benefits.