Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’s newly formed asset management vehicle has asked US regulators for permission to list a fund that would hold the privacy coin Zcash outright, proposing a sponsor charge far below the fee already collected by the only live US product of its kind.
On October 6, 2026, Winklevoss Asset Services, LLC submitted a preliminary Form S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the Winklevoss Zcash ETF.
The document describes a Delaware statutory trust organized as an exchange-traded product, not a mutual fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940.
Its stated aim is passive: to give shareholders exposure to the market price of ZEC held by the trust, reduced by operating costs and other liabilities, without trying to outperform the token.
The shares are expected to trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker WINK, subject to a notice of issuance.
Before the offering there is no public market for them.
Creations and redemptions would occur in baskets.
Authorized participants would deliver cash equal to the ZEC represented by a basket, and the trust would buy or sell the token as needed; the preliminary prospectus also contemplates limited use of ZEC itself in certain transfers.
Net asset value would be struck each business day against a pricing benchmark still left blank in the filing—described only as a 60-minute time-weighted average drawn from an index of trades on major ZEC platforms.
The sponsor, formed on October 1, 2026 and wholly owned by Winklevoss Asset Services Holdings, LLC, would receive an annual unified fee of 0.25 percent of the trust’s ZEC holdings.
That fee accrues daily in ZEC and is payable monthly in ZEC or cash.
In return, the sponsor assumes ordinary expenses—administrator, custodian, trustee, listing, audit, regulatory, and website costs among them—with no stated cap.
Extraordinary items such as taxes, litigation, and certain brokerage costs stay with the trust.
The sponsor may waive all or part of the fee for stated periods at its discretion, without any obligation to continue a waiver.
Custody would sit with Gemini Trust Company, LLC, an affiliate of the sponsor and a New York State-chartered limited liability trust company supervised by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).
The filing says Gemini would keep the trust’s ZEC in segregated cold-storage addresses verifiable on the Zcash blockchain, separate from other clients’ coins, moving coins to hot wallets only temporarily to process withdrawals or clearing. CSC Delaware Trust Company is named trustee.
Several other service-provider roles remain bracketed and unfinished.
The trust has also contracted Cypherpunk Technologies Inc. as its “Zcash Ecosystem Partner.”
Under that agreement, Cypherpunk may assist with coinholder polling and voting, offer guidance on protocol and technical developments, and supply related advisory work.
Separately, Winklevoss Capital Fund, LLC has signaled, through affiliates, an interest in buying up to $100 million of shares from authorized participants or in the open market.
The prospectus stresses that the indication is not a binding commitment; the potential buyers could take more, less, or none.
The registration statement is preliminary and subject to completion.
Several commercial terms—the precise benchmark, seed pricing, and basket size—are still open. An S-1 filing does not itself authorize listing or trading; effectiveness and exchange approval remain outstanding. Investors would not receive the protections that apply to registered investment companies or to commodity pools.
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