Shiny Coins #24 – Four-Digit Zcash Steals the Week as Payrolls Clip the $82K Wick

Friday, September 4, 2026. Bitcoin last printed around $79,670, up a quiet-looking +2.9% on seven days that hid a full circus. The tape climbed from the high-$77,000s into a $82,281 wick after Fed Governor Christopher Waller said a September hold was still on the table and spot bitcoin ETFs booked a fat inflow day — CoinDesk put Thursday’s haul near $731 million. Strategy added another 4,603 BTC (~$370 million) after its summer pause. Then the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped August nonfarm payrolls: +162,000 versus a ~56,000 consensus. Unemployment stayed 4.1%. Hike odds at the September 15–16 FOMC jumped back toward a coin-flip. Longs ate roughly $278 million in liquidations in a few hours. Total market cap is about $2.78 trillion after tagging a seven-month high near $2.82 trillion on Thursday. Bitcoin dominance is ~57.7%. Alternative.me’s Fear & Greed Index is 74 (Greed), up from 68 last Saturday.

The shiny list is not “BTC went to $82k.” It is the names that either printed a four-digit handle, built a new meme factory on Robinhood Chain, or kept the privacy bid alive while payrolls clipped the wick: ZEC, PONS, UNI, HNT, ARB, HYPE, XMR, DASH, SOL.

The Shiny Coins Right Now

1. ZEC — Zcash — $1,023   +27.6% 7d

This is the week’s headline, full stop. ZEC tagged roughly $1,023–$1,047 — the first trip through $1,000 in almost a decade — and briefly sat inside the crypto top 10 with a market cap near $17 billion. CoinDesk timed the squeeze: about $36.6 million in leveraged ZEC got liquidated in 24 hours, $34.5 million of it shorts. Open interest ballooned toward $2.3 billion. Grayscale’s spot Zcash ETF (ZCSH), listed on NYSE Arca on August 25, is still the TradFi permission slip. Last week we called the post-listing tape Cautious. The market disagreed, violently.

Key metric: first $1,000 print in ~10 years; ~$34.5M short liquidations; ~$17B market cap.

Outlook (1–4 weeks): Cautious — the squeeze already happened; $1,000 is now a magnet and a trapdoor.

Shielded txs, unshielded four-digit hopium.

2. PONS — Pons — $0.68   +427% 7d

Robinhood Chain finally grew a Pump.fun. Pons is the no-code launchpad on Robinhood’s Arbitrum-stack L2 (public mainnet July 1). The house token ripped from a mid-pack meme into a ~$485 million market cap with hundreds of millions in weekly volume. One September 3 snapshot had the platform printing nearly $6 million in a single day’s fees and sitting among DefiLlama’s top fee protocols. Binance Wallet added it to Alpha. This is not a white paper. It is a fee machine riding a new chain’s first degen cycle.

Key metric: ~+427% seven days; ~$485M market cap on a launchpad that did not exist in June.

Outlook: Very Bullish near-term, fade risk is extreme after a 4x week.

Pump.fun, but make it orange.

3. UNI — Uniswap — $6.12   +34% 7d

While memes ate Robinhood Chain, old-school DEX beta woke up on Ethereum. UNI ran from the mid-$4.60s last Saturday through a ~$6.50 local high before Friday’s payroll fade parked it near $6.12. Market cap is back around $3.9–$4.0 billion with hundreds of millions turning over. When BTC tags $82k and alts are allowed to breathe for 36 hours, UNI is still how liquid desks express “DeFi is not dead.” The 7-day is the cleanest large-cap alt print on this list that is not a privacy coin.

Key metric: ~+34% week; ~$4B market cap reclaimed.

Outlook: Bullish while $5.80 holds; payrolls made $6.50 a sell-the-rip level for now.

4. HNT — Helium — $0.58   +152% 7d

Last week’s hidden-in-plain-sight rocket did not stop at $0.39. Celina, Texas — the municipal Wi-Fi-to-carrier story — kept dragging in tourists. HNT wicked toward $0.99 on August 30, then did what every 5x DePIN candle does: gave a lot of it back. Friday’s print near $0.58 is still more than a double from the pre-Celina $0.22 handle. The template is real. The multiple is no longer a secret.

Key metric: city deployment still the catalyst; +152% week after an $0.99 wick.

Outlook: Cautious / Fading Heat after the blow-off. Next city or NGMI.

The hotspot printed. Then it printed the dump.

5. ARB — Arbitrum — $0.131   +48% 7d

Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum Orbit stack. PONS going vertical is, whether the market admits it or not, ARB beta. The token climbed from the high-$0.08s last weekend through a $0.145 local high before payrolls knocked it back to ~$0.131. That is still the strongest major L2 seven-day on the board. We have watched ARB grind lower for most of 2026. This is the first week the chain-under-the-chain trade showed up in the candle.

Key metric: ~+48% week as the house L2 under Robinhood Chain caught a bid.

Outlook: Bullish if PONS and Robinhood Chain activity stay loud; Cautious if that tape dies.

6. HYPE — Hyperliquid — $84.07   +5.1% 7d

HYPE tagged a fresh local ATH around $88–$89 on September 3 — U.S. expansion talks with Kraken’s parent, Payward, plus HIP-4 permissionless deployments stacked the narrative. It still sits in the top 10 with an ~$19 billion market cap. Friday’s fade to ~$84 is a rounding error next to ZEC’s squeeze, but the house that sells the leverage rarely looks cheap when open interest is elevated and BTC just showed traders a $5,000 wick.

Key metric: new local ATH ~$89; still a top-10 coin through a payroll flush.

Outlook: Bullish above $80; $78 is where we get less cute about it.

The casino listed a U.S. expansion rumor and still outperformed half the patrons.

7. XMR — Monero — $516   +10.5% 7d

ZEC got the ETF, the $1,000 screenshot, and the liquidation porn. XMR got the quieter bid again — $466 last Saturday to about $516, market cap near $9.7 billion. No NYSE ticker. Just the original shielded chain re-rating because TradFi put a privacy ETP on a national exchange and the whole category re-priced.

Key metric: ~+10.5% week with a ~$9.7B market cap that actually moves.

Outlook: Bullish as long as the privacy rotation holds $1,000 ZEC as a headline.

8. DASH — Dash — $59   +27% 24h

The privacy basket did not stop at ZEC/XMR. Dash ripped into the high-$50s on Friday with ~$200 million changing hands — a ghost-chain bounce that only happens when a sector ticker is on fire and traders start buying the cheapest rhyming name. This is not a fundamentals week for Dash. Treat it like a satellite, not a thesis.

Key metric: one of Friday’s largest 24-hour prints among coins with a real market cap.

Outlook: Fading Heat unless the privacy bid keeps spraying sideways.

When ZEC hits four digits, even Dash remembers it has a ticker.

9. SOL — Solana — $101.72   +2.1% 7d

Solana did not win the week on price. It won a governance fight. SGP-0002 — double disinflation, 15% to 30% — passed at 67.001% on August 28 after Kraken flipped late. Projected issuance drops by about 18.9 million SOL over six years; terminal 1.5% inflation moves up to roughly H1 2029. Price is still glued to the $100–$104 range while the degen flow migrated, briefly, to Robinhood Chain. Holding $100 after a $82k BTC wick and a hot payrolls print is not nothing.

Key metric: first binding on-chain issuance cut; $102 area still the line.

Outlook: Cautious / Bullish while $100 holds. The vote is done; the candle has to confirm it.

Hidden Gem of the Week

USELESS — Useless Coin — ~$0.25 / ~$252 million market cap   +327% 7d

Not in the top 20. Not a protocol. Just the week’s most honest large-micro meme after PONS, with a seven-day triple-plus and $200 million+ days of volume. When the market cap of a coin named Useless is a quarter of a billion dollars, the regime is still degen — it just changed venues. Position size like the ticker is autobiographical.

One to Watch Closely

Bitcoin at $79,670 — and the two-week Fed gauntlet that starts with CPI.

Thursday’s $82,281 print was the highest since May. Friday’s 162,000-job beat put September hike odds back on the table and dumped ~$278 million of longs. Next Friday’s August CPI is the print Waller said he wanted to see. The FOMC is September 15–16. A hold of $78,000–$79,000 keeps the mid-August higher-low intact. A clean break of $76,800 — the level we flagged last week — takes the air out of every shiny coin on this list.

Closing

The rotation tells you the regime in one sentence: risk-on came back for 36 hours, then got picky again. Bitcoin dominance near 58% means capital is still not spraying across 200 alts. It is concentrating in stories with a screenshot (ZEC at $1,000), a new venue (Pons on Robinhood Chain), or a liquid beta (UNI, ARB, HYPE). Privacy is no longer a Telegram group chat — it has a four-digit coin, an ETF, and a short-squeeze body count. Memecoins still work, but the factory moved: Solana kept the chain, Robinhood Chain rented the carnival. Helium proved DePIN can print a candle and a hangover in the same week. Greed is 74, not 90. That is the window where shiny coins can still run — and where a second hot print before September 16 can rekt the people who bought Thursday’s $82k breakout with 20x.

Not financial advice. DYOR. Don’t get married to a ticker that just printed $1,000 for the first time since the last cycle’s grandparents were trading.

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