The Winklevoss Twins Filed a Zcash ETF and Named It WINK

In 2013, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss filed for the first U.S. spot bitcoin ETF. The SEC turned it down in 2017, citing concerns about price manipulation, and spot bitcoin funds didn't reach the market until 2024. On October 6, the twins filed for another spot crypto ETF. This one holds Zcash, the privacy coin that exchanges were delisting three years ago, and it would trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WINK.

The filing is a preliminary S-1 for the Winklevoss ZCash ETF, a Delaware statutory trust formed the same day. The sponsor is Winklevoss Asset Services, a newly formed firm that The Block reported is wholly owned by Winklevoss Asset Services Holdings. Bitcoin.com News identified Cameron Winklevoss as its CEO. The fund would hold ZEC directly, not futures or derivatives.

A fund built from Winklevoss parts

Look at the parties to the filing and most of them lead back to the same two people. Custody goes to Gemini Trust Company, which the S-1 calls "an affiliate of the Sponsor." Bitcoin.com reported the coins would sit in segregated cold storage. CSC Delaware Trust Company is the trustee. The fee is an annual unified charge of 0.25% of the trust's ZEC holdings, and the sponsor pays most ordinary operating expenses out of it.

The first buyer may be family too. The S-1 says Winklevoss Capital Fund, another affiliate, "has indicated an interest in purchasing an aggregate of up to $100 million of Shares." The filing says that indication is not binding. A sponsor's own fund signalling nine figures of demand before launch is a strong statement, and also a reminder of how much of the early demand for this fund may come from inside the house.

Then there is the "Zcash Ecosystem Partner." The trust has signed Cypherpunk Technologies for the role, which Bitcoin.com said covers technical guidance, advisory services, and help with coinholder polling and voting. Cypherpunk is Nasdaq-listed and was formerly the biotech company Leap Therapeutics. It rebranded in November 2025 as a Zcash treasury company, backed by a $58.9 million investment from Winklevoss Capital, and The Block reported that Will McEvoy, a Winklevoss Capital principal, was named its chief investment officer. Cypherpunk has said it wants to own 5% of the Zcash network. By the end of 2025 it held about 290,000 ZEC, roughly 1.76% of circulating supply, according to a company release.

The pieces fit together in one direction. A Winklevoss treasury company holds ZEC. A Winklevoss custodian would hold the ETF's ZEC. A Winklevoss fund may seed the ETF. If WINK draws inflows, it buys more of the asset all three already own.

Third in line, behind a fund that already works

WINK is not first. The Block called the Winklevoss sponsor the third issuer to pursue a U.S. spot Zcash ETF. Grayscale's ZCSH started trading on NYSE Arca on August 25, and The Block reported it reached nearly $890 million in net assets within a month, then did a 3-for-1 share split. Bitwise filed in January for a Zcash strategy fund, one of 11 single-token products, which would also list on NYSE Arca if approved.

Grayscale's launch is why the twins are filing now. Flux reported last month that ZEC hit $1,225 on September 6, its highest level since the chaos of its 2016 launch, with the new ETF supplying a steady buyer for a coin with a thin tradable float. A second spot fund on a second exchange, at a fee that will invite comparison, is a bet that the demand ZCSH found is the start of something, not the whole thing.

The filing says creations and redemptions would run on a cash model, meaning authorized participants hand over cash and the trust buys the ZEC. The draft is not consistent on this. The cover page describes cash subscriptions, while the plan-of-distribution section allows either ZEC or cash. Plenty of other fields are still blank, including the administrator, transfer agent, basket size, and benchmark provider. Bitcoin.com noted the offering remains subject to SEC review before anything can trade.

The privacy coin's paperwork

The risk-factor section reads like a list of reasons Zcash was once considered unlistable. The filing says "the privacy-preserving features of the Zcash Network make it susceptible to certain unique vulnerabilities," and it walks through one that already happened. In June, Shielded Labs disclosed a soundness flaw in the zero-knowledge circuit of Zcash's Orchard shielded pool. Blockstream reported the bug had been live since Orchard activated about four years earlier and, in principle, allowed counterfeit ZEC to be minted inside the pool without leaving a trace on-chain. Developers disabled Orchard with an emergency soft fork, then re-enabled it with a patched circuit. Blockstream reported ZEC fell about 60%, from around $629 to a $254 low, in just over a day. Shielded Labs said the flaw was probably never exploited, a claim that, by the nature of a shielded pool, can't be fully proven.

Governance gets similar treatment. The S-1 states plainly that "ownership of ZEC does not confer formal governance rights over the Zcash Network." Coinholder polls are open only to shielded holders using self-custodied wallets, and the filing says the trust does not expect to take part. That is where the ecosystem partner comes in. The fund itself stays out of the vote, and a Winklevoss-backed company that holds about 2% of supply in its own name stays in it.

What happens next

The S-1 is a proposal. It needs SEC review and must be declared effective before WINK can list, and the terms in the draft can change before then. The regulatory climate is very different from 2017. Grayscale already runs a spot ZEC fund, and a regulator that once rejected bitcoin over manipulation concerns has let a privacy coin trade on a national exchange.

That shift is the real news in the filing. Thirteen years after the twins tried to get bitcoin into a brokerage account and failed, they are lining up to sell the asset regulators once treated as the hardest case. The fund carries their name, their custodian holds the coins, and their treasury company is the partner. If it launches, it will be the most Winklevoss product on the market.