A cat memecoin paid $2.8M in zcash, which is about $6 per payout

A cat memecoin on Solana has handed its holders about $2.8 million worth of zcash. Divide that by the number of payouts and the picture changes: more than 470,000 distributions works out near six dollars each. Both figures come from the same report, and they describe different things.

How the zcash payouts work

The token is Anonymous Cat, ticker ZCAT. It charges a 3% tax on every transfer, converts most of that into ZEC and sends it to wallets holding at least $20 of ZCAT. About 2,320 ZEC has gone out that way.

There is no external revenue in that loop. The payouts are funded by the people moving the token, so a holder collecting zcash is collecting a slice of what other holders paid to trade. Activity is the product, and the 3% is the price of it.

The pairing is the genuinely new part. ZCAT trades against ZEC rather than against SOL or a stablecoin, through a Solana launchpad called StonkFun that lets a new token pick its own quote asset. That choice is what makes a memecoin able to pay in something other than itself.

The denominator did the work

The denominator did most of the work. Zcash trades at $1,204.54 as this goes out, up 45.3% over a week, 138.2% over a month and about 2,480% over the past year. At the price ZEC held a year ago the same 2,320 coins would have been worth around $108,000 rather than $2.8 million.

Nothing in the mechanism changed over that year. The tax rate is the same, the payout rule is the same, and the number of coins is what it is. The headline moved because the asset the payouts are denominated in moved.

ZCAT itself trades near $0.13, up 63% in a day, with a market value around $129 million and its record set this morning. ZEC sits ninth by market capitalisation at $20.4 billion, and it is still 62% below the high it reached in 2016.

What it costs to join

This is the second reward mechanic in a week that pays in a rising asset while the rising asset does the explaining. Robinhood Chain memecoins ran the same shape on Friday, with a launchpad token worth more than the coins it launched.

A holder does nothing to earn it. The payout arrives on its own as long as at least twenty dollars of the token sits in the wallet, and that simplicity is what makes the mechanic spread. It looks like interest on a deposit while working the other way round.

For anyone tempted, the arithmetic is worth finishing. A 3% transfer tax makes trading expensive, the payout depends on other people continuing to trade anyway, and the size of each payout depends on a privacy coin that has run 2,480% in a year. Two of those three things reverse quickly, as the $456 million of shorts closed on Friday showed in a different market.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice; treat it as information to consider.