Overview
ZecYield turns the swap-fee cash flow of every pool ZEC trades in into one ERC-4626 token on Robinhood Chain. You hold the fees, not the coin.
What ZecYield is
ZecYield is a single vault on Robinhood Chain. It owns the right to future swap fees of the pools ZEC trades in, on every chain it trades on, and it issues zYLD, an ERC-4626 share priced at net asset value in ETH. The tradeable zYLD token is a separate Pons v2 launch on the same chain.
It never holds the underlying tokens. Zcash has no DEX of its own; ZEC is bridged to Solana, NEAR, Base and BNB Chain and traded there in ordinary AMM pools, each of which charges a fee tier on every swap and pays it to the liquidity position. A liquidity provider sells that fee stream to the vault for a term, gets paid up front in ETH, and takes the stream back when the term ends. The position never moves, the tokens never move, and the vault carries none of the price.
Long volume, not price
This is the whole thesis. Holding ZEC is long price. ZecYield is long the number of times ZEC changes hands. Those are not the same bet, and they often point in opposite directions: the day ZEC falls 30% is the busiest trading day it will have all quarter.
ZEC dumps
price down 30%
Volume spikes
every venue at once
Harvest rises
fees are a cut of volume
NAV cannot fall because the coin fell. It can go flat, which is the honest failure mode: if nobody trades, nobody pays. See Risk.
Why eigen
ZEC pool fees are correlated. When ZEC is moving, Orca on Solana and Rhea on NEAR and Aerodrome on Base all earn more; when it is quiet, all of them earn less. Stack the hourly fees of every eligible pool into a matrix and take its first principal component. That factor is the market yield, and it is the only thing the vault pays for. Everything after it is single-venue noise. The full derivation is on Spectrum.
The numbers
14
fee streams held
21.1%
λ₁ share of fee variance
$69.8M
24h ZEC volume across them
35,576
annual fee flow, ETH
These come from the same reader the site serves at /api/stats, refreshed every fifteen minutes from live GeckoTerminal volume. Anything derived from the model is labelled model wherever it appears.
The funnel behind that first number: the search returns 59 ZEC pools across every network the indexer covers, the ones with real depth and an LP position are kept, and 14 of those clear the eligibility gates. NEAR Intents pools are discovered and excluded, because an intent is a solver's quote rather than a pool and there is no fee position to buy.