Forecasting the Meme Coin: ZCAT — Where Could the Paper-Bag Cat Go Next?

In late August, a cat in a paper bag showed up on Solana. It calls itself ZCAT (Anonymous Cat). It doesn’t pitch a team or a roadmap — it just repeats one line: every trade takes a 3% tax, swaps it into ZEC, and splits it among all holders, and the ledger is open for anyone to check. A meme coin selling “verifiability” as its pitch is rare. This piece does no price calling. It does one thing — lay out where the coin could go from here. Up front: what follows are possibilities, not guarantees, and there is no price target.

Three Facts You Can’t Ignore

• The ledger checks out, but the base is thin. On the 17 September snapshot, ZCAT’s market cap was about $146 million, yet DexScreener’s 30 ZCAT-base pairs summed to only about $4.09 million in liquidity — just 2.8% of market cap. A sell order of any real size pushes the price around.
• The rewards are funded entirely by turnover. No treasury, no outside revenue. Every ZEC payout is paid for by the 3% tax on other people’s trades. When trading stops, distributions stop.
• The withdrawal sits with a single private key. The only address that can pull the withheld tax,

  5KXDF6QnqhBj72hDtJNkkpFaQVUfbFXNybMsp3DiK6tD

  , is visible on-chain. But what that key does with it, no one outside can see.

Bullish Case: Payouts Keep Flowing, ZEC Holds

1,200–

1,300

The best script needs the “payout engine” and the “pool depth” to improve together. When the conditions line up:

• ZEC holds the

  1,200–

  1,300 zone, so the dollar value of each payout rises with it;
• the payout ledger keeps adding roughly $1 million a day, and holder count keeps growing at about 3.5% per day (it went from 18,596 to 25,150 between 7 and 17 September);
• the liquidity-to-market-cap ratio climbs off its 2.8% floor, and especially a larger exchange lists a derivative;
• the “pay dividends in ZEC” model keeps getting copied by the launchpad, pulling more capital into the related pools.

If all of that holds, ZCAT has a real case for renewed attention. The publicly cited peak market cap is about $170 million — one Chinese outlet cites above $180 million — and that becomes the reference level a new leg would be measured against. But every step is conditional, and no part of it is assured.

To get back to that level, liquidity would have to more than double from its current ~$4.09 million — and liquidity is exactly the thinnest link.

Base Case: Trading Continues, but No Clear Direction

On the current data, the most likely shape is churn without a direction. On 17 September the buy/sell count ratio was about 1.05 (slightly more buys), holders are rising but the pace can’t be confirmed as accelerating, and liquidity is stable but thin. In that setup, market cap swings, payouts keep rising as long as volume and ZEC hold, and attention drifts to whatever new launch the launchpad ecosystem spots next. I treat ZCAT as a working mechanism with no particular reason to break out. As long as volume stays above $9 million and ZEC holds $1,200, it just drifts — no crash, no breakout, and no new story either.

Bearish Case: Trading Dries Up, Payouts Shrink

The thing to watch most is the funding breaking. The logic is simple: volume falls, the 3% tax collects less, distributions shrink, and the reason to hold weakens — the mechanism is self-funded, with no treasury and no outside revenue.

What would trigger it: ZEC dropping below its September range; daily volume collapsing from about $9.34 million toward the low single millions; holder growth flattening or reversing; liquidity pulled from the deeper pools; or early accumulators starting to distribute. There is an asymmetry worth remembering: **ZCAT’s round-trip cost is about 6% (3% in, 3% out), so a holder needs a real move just to break even.** If daily volume collapses below $5 million and holder growth turns negative, the payout engine stalls and the price loses the only logic still holding it up.

The Five Metrics I’m Watching Over the Next 7–30 Days

1. New holders — can the growth rate hold (two-week gain of +35%, but that’s a rate from two snapshots, not a curve)? If net growth turns negative for several days in a row, early players are leaving and the payout story starts leaking.
2. Volume — can it stay up? About $22–27 million on 7 September had fallen to about $9.34 million by 17 September; the “food” for payouts is shrinking. If it drops below $5 million, the 3% tax collects far less and payouts can shrink visibly.
3. Liquidity ratio — does it improve off the current ~2.8%? Below 5% still counts as thin. If it stays near 3% for two weeks, no new money is stepping in to catch the fall — the moves are all old money turning over.
4. ZEC itself — can it hold

   1,200–

   1,300, since the dividend’s dollar value is priced in ZEC? If ZEC falls below $1,200, the dollar value of each payout drops with it and the reason to hold weakens.
5. That one withdrawal key — does its behaviour change frequency, or stop? The state is on-chain, the behaviour isn’t visible, so only anomalies can be watched. If it goes silent for a long stretch, that’s the bigger red flag: the money may already be gone, just with no trace on-chain.

How It Differs From Other Payout Coins

ZCAT’s pitch is an on-chain payout ledger you can check — that sets it apart from most meme coins that only tell a chart story. It still shares the fatal flaw of early “hold-and-earn” tokens: rewards are funded by the tax on existing trades, and they stop the moment trading stops. The difference is ZCAT prices payouts in ZEC and publishes the ledger, so at least you can verify it is actually paying out instead of taking a group-chat’s word for it. That difference is exactly why it can be watched — and why watching it is never the same as it being safe.

One Last Line: Worth Watching Is Not the Same as Going Up

Keep this straight: ZCAT is not Zcash. It only borrows ZEC for the dividend story. It runs on Solana and has nothing to do with the Zcash project, and gives you no rights to the Zcash network.

“Avoiding some common scam risks” is not the same as safe. Thin liquidity, no team, no socials, rewards dependent on turnover, and tax withdrawal in a single private key — any one of those four breaking changes the story.

One line to close: on the data we have, ZCAT is a cat worth keeping an eye on. But “worth watching” is never the same as “the price will go up.”

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Data Sources and References (snapshot as of 2026-09-17)

1. On-chain primary data

• Solana mainnet RPC (

  getAccountInfo

  /

  getTokenSupply

  , 17 Sep 08:50 UTC): mint authorities, 3% rate,

  maximumFee

  ,

  withdrawWithheldAuthority

  ,

  withheldAmount

  , supply.
• GeckoTerminal (token record + pools endpoint, paginated, 17 Sep 07:51 / 08:55 UTC): holder count, distribution, mint/freeze authority, honeypot status, the 80-pool base/quote split.
• DexScreener (token endpoint + per-symbol search, 17 Sep): 30 pairs’ price/liquidity/volume/count,

  pairCreatedAt

  , market cap and FDV.
• DexPaprika (Solana token page + BNB same-name contract page, 17 Sep): 24h volume and buy/sell counts, all-time high; the BNB impostor’s liquidity and zero volume.

2. Token and market data

• CoinGecko (

  anonymous-cat

  /

  zcash

  /

  bitcoin

  , 17 Sep 08:47–08:52 UTC): price, market cap, FDV, ATH/ATL, rank; ZEC and BTC 7-day OHLC.

3. Official announcements and launchpad

• LBank (spot + ZCATUSDT perpetual, 6 Sep), MEXC (Meme+ spot + perpetual, 6/7 Sep), Ourbit (Innovation Zone spot, 6 Sep), Biconomy (spot, 15 Sep), Gate.io (spot + convert, 16 Sep), Bitrue (Alpha zone), Aster (perpetual), StonkFun (launchpad page, 17 Sep returned “Token not found”).

4. Media and research

• Crypto Briefing (ZEC payout 5,963 / ZCSH listing; ZEC above $1,300 / NU7, both 16 Sep)
• Phemex Research, “What Is Anonymous Cat (ZCAT)?” (7 Sep supply read, holder read, authority wallets, same-name impostor)
• MEXC Learn (no whitepaper/team/socials; 94% deposit credit), Gate.io Learn (3% tax, 1 billion cap, Token-2022)
• BSCN (ZEC ninth by rank / ETF inflows / SEC probe closed), CoinPost (ZCSH holdings), AInvest (payout key / liquidity), Bitrue blog (7 Sep DexScreener snapshot), BingX / Huohuo Finance / on-chain analyst Ai Yi (6 Sep whale case), Pickaxe (market roundup), 99Bitcoins / Brave New Coin (sector background)

Note: most market figures are minutes-level snapshots from 17 September and can go stale at any time. Different platforms report different numbers because of pool coverage, base/quote attribution, and supply denominators; this article states the differences side by side rather than averaging them. The whale’s average entry price and the reported ~$0.19 intraday price are “claims with a source” and were not independently verified.

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About Me & tronsell.io

About me: I’m Louise Lee, a researcher at tronsell.io and a long-time participant in digital assets. I have lived through several bull and bear cycles. My method for taking apart meme coins is simple: I don’t read the shills, I read the chain; I don’t guess the price, I trace the origin. In this column I pick one coin a day and, from verified facts, lay out where it could go. This is research only, not investment advice, and it gives no price target.

About tronsell.io: tronsell.io is a platform focused on optimising on-chain transaction fees on TRON. Its self-operated energy pool stably stakes 400 million TRX, outputting 3.7 billion energy and 35 million bandwidth, serving 10+ institutional clients. We do on-chain research because only by truly understanding the mechanics and the costs can we help users save wasted money on every transfer.