Top 10 altcoins in 3 days: privacy coins storm the ranking

While bitcoin dominance holds near 58.9% and the Altcoin Season Index sits stuck at 37 out of 100 — meaning capital is rotating into select altcoins rather than lifting the whole market — the past three days brought a structural shakeup to the top 10 altcoins by market cap: privacy coins Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR) broke into the top 10 for the first time, pushing out Cardano (ADA) and Chainlink (LINK).

Ethereum remains the clearest institutional favorite: spot ETH ETFs pulled in $244.94 million over the week, the strongest weekly inflow in nearly four months, taking cumulative net inflows since launch past $11.46 billion. On-chain, one wallet withdrew 10,500 ETH (roughly $20 million) from OKX in a single move — a classic cold-storage accumulation signal.

XRP told a much messier story: weekly spot ETF inflows collapsed 93% to just $1.01 million, and fund net assets slipped from $988 million to $964 million, making XRP products the weakest among major crypto ETFs in this window. Institutional interest wasn't entirely absent, though — asset manager IMC-Chicago (which oversees $418 billion in assets) bought 50,975 XRP ETF shares, and the whale-to-retail activity spread on Binance climbed to 57.7%, though analysts caution that figure alone doesn't prove deliberate accumulation.

Solana saw a far more aggressive move: a newly created wallet deposited 8.43 million USDC and launched a TWAP order to open a 20x leveraged long on 500,000 SOL — by August 9, roughly 186,000–199,838 SOL (about $14-15 million) had already been filled. TRON, meanwhile, posted $37.78 million in protocol revenue over the first five days of August, crossed 15 billion total transactions, and launched gasless transfers with MoonPay, letting senders move assets without holding TRX for fees.

The standout story of the three-day window was Zcash: price jumped roughly 5% in a day, and the ZEC/BTC ratio climbed from 0.45 to 7.68 milli-BTC — a 17x outperformance against bitcoin over ten months. The driver is a supply squeeze: 30-35% of all ZEC sits locked in the shielded pool, and daily turnover relative to market cap has fallen from 22.5% to 2.4%. Against that backdrop, mining company Fortitude Mining (backed by DCG) bought a mining facility with 12.5MW of capacity in Nebraska for roughly $4.7 million and plans to expand to 60MW+ across seven sites. Monero saw a similar, if quieter, move — up nearly 4% on the week and almost 20% on the month — but it's facing headwinds too: 73 exchanges have now delisted the coin, and starting July 2027 the EU's anti-money-laundering rules will force all EU-regulated exchanges to drop privacy coins from listings (self-custody and non-EU exchanges are unaffected).

• ETH: weekly ETF inflow of $244.94M, the strongest in nearly 4 months
• XRP: ETF inflows collapsed 93% to $1.01M, but IMC-Chicago bought 50,975 fund shares
• SOL: a whale opened a 20x leveraged long on 500,000 SOL via a TWAP order
• ZEC and XMR broke into the top 10 altcoins for the first time, pushing out ADA and LINK

We covered a similar snapshot three days ago in our piece on the top 10 altcoins and Cosmos's 9% jump amid extreme market fear — the top 10 lineup looked different back then. And this isn't Zcash's first notable headline in recent weeks: we previously reported that the project scheduled a ZEC coinholder vote on the NU7 upgrade for August 25.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.