Grayscale Buys the Wall Street Journal Front Page to Advertise Zcash

Crypto fund manager Grayscale bought the entire front page of the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, November 10, for an ad about Zcash (ZEC). The page carries the Zcash name over a wavy black-and-white pattern and the line "The Next Era of Crypto".

What Grayscale did

The front page is a paid advertisement, not an article. Inside the paper, Grayscale bought a second full-page ad for its Zcash ETF, which trades under the ticker ZCSH.

The same day, Grayscale launched Zcash Invest, a campaign that combines education projects with national advertising. It also promised $1 million to projects and nonprofits that build on the Zcash network.

Why it matters

The front page of the Wall Street Journal is where business readers look first. Buying all of it puts a privacy coin in front of mainstream investors, and it is part of Grayscale's push to take Zcash mainstream.

For ZEC holders, it shows that one of the largest managers of regulated crypto funds is spending real marketing money on the coin. Grayscale has backed Zcash since 2017, and its Zcash ETF holds more than $400 million worth of ZEC.

What Zcash is

Zcash is a cryptocurrency built for privacy. Its "shielded" transactions hide who sent money, who received it and how much, while Bitcoin transactions are visible to anyone on the blockchain.

An ETF lets people get exposure to a coin through a regular brokerage account, without buying and storing the coin themselves. Grayscale is part of Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group.