What's Driving Token Prices? January 14, 2026

ZEC (-7.3%) - Last week, the entire team of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the for-profit business supporting the development of privacy token Zcash, quit after a dispute with its non-profit board. While exact details are sparse, it appears that ECC wanted to monetize Zashi, the Zcash wallet developed by ECC. Its board, on the other hand, resisted this change, leading to a mass exodus from the company. The ex-ECC team has started a new project, cashz, with a new wallet, which they claim is built from the codebase of Zashi. The dispute illustrates the continued misalignment between lab and non-profit entities supporting decentralized protocols. ZEC, which was up 780% in H2 2025, traded down -7.3% on this news.
POL (+24%) - Yesterday, Layer-2 protocol Polygon announced some big changes along with an acquisition announcement. The protocol is broadly planning to become a US-regulated payments platform, offering fiat on/off-ramps, 1-click transactions across chains, easy onboarding, and more. The new payments focus will be achieved with the acquisition of Coinme and Sequence. Coinme offers money transmitter licenses and regulated wallet infrastructure across 48 states and 50,000+ retail locations. Sequence, meanwhile, offers highly secure 1-click cross-chain transactions. This pivot from Polygon, which has evolved from a general-purpose Layer-2 to a DeFi chain over the years, is in line with a broader trend toward payment infrastructure. Polygon joins other chains such as Stripe’s Tempo, Circle’s Arc, Plasma, and many others in a race to create the predominant stablecoin payments system.
PUMP (+25%) - The founder of Pump.fun, the leading memecoin launchpad, broke a two-month silence last week to announce big changes coming to the project. While specific changes were not disclosed, Pump.fun’s founder, Alon, admitted that Creator Fees needed to be reworked in order to reward higher-quality projects. In their current form, Creator Fees are a percentage of Pump.fun’s trading fees assigned to creators of launched memecoins that are “successful.” However, in many cases, after generating fees and launching a token, a Creator would abandon the project, hurting the holders of that token. The team has hinted at changes that would add additional token utility to launched tokens and reward fewer, higher-quality projects. After peaking in January 2025 with approximately 57,000 token launches per day, Pump.fun has seen its new launches decline to around 27,000 per day. Despite this, the project is still generating $390M per year (using the last 30 days of data).

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