On-chain investigator ZachXBT has accused a Zcash-based NFT project built around zero-knowledge proofs, or zkSNARKs, of raising approximately $17 million from thousands of investors without delivering the features it promised buyers before launch.
The project, a collection of 10,000 profile picture NFTs minted on Zcash, sold 8,000 of those pieces through a blind auction that closed on September 19, 2026. The auction drew 16,971 bids and settled at a uniform clearing price of 1.5 ZEC per NFT, roughly $2,190 at the time. Total volume across the auction reached an estimated 25,305 ZEC, worth close to $36.94 million.
Of that sum, the project returned about 13,309 ZEC, or roughly $19.43 million, to bidders who did not win an allocation. That refund process left an estimated $17.5 million in treasury, the figure ZachXBT points to as the gap between what was collected and what was actually built.
What was promised, and what was not built
According to ZachXBT, the project has not distributed any governance framework for the treasury or the collection, has not built the community access tools that were part of its pitch, and has not announced any ecosystem partnerships. All three, the investigator says, were represented to buyers as forthcoming.
Separately from the public sale, the team behind the project reserved 10 percent of the collection, or 1,000 NFTs, for itself free of charge before the auction opened to bidders. The team also retained a 5 percent royalty on all secondary sales of the collection going forward.
The story was picked up shortly after the auction closed by crypto news outlets Odaily and TechFlow, both of which reported on the size of the raise and the structure of the sale in the days following September 19.
A privacy-chain launch under scrutiny
The project's choice of Zcash, a blockchain built around shielded transactions, gave the sale a degree of privacy uncommon among NFT launches, most of which run on fully transparent chains such as Ethereum or Solana. That same opacity is now part of what makes ZachXBT's on-chain reconstruction of the auction, the refunds and the resulting treasury notable: tracing the flow of funds on a privacy-focused chain is markedly harder than on a transparent one, and the figures cited by ZachXBT represent his own estimate of the auction's mechanics rather than a fully disclosed accounting from the project itself.
For a European audience increasingly exposed to privacy-coin infrastructure through NFT and DeFi experiments, the episode underscores a recurring pattern: large sums raised quickly through auction mechanics, followed by a gap between fundraising totals and delivered product, with on-chain investigators rather than regulators doing the initial accounting.
