I think the argument might be that Zcash’s security against 51% attacks is correlated with mining rewards (which is correlated with price and thus market cap). ZSAs’ privacy makes 51% attacks a whole lot harder to execute in practice, so I’m not sure the argument applies, but doing million-dollar transactions on a network that provides less than millions-of-dollars worth of security may be unattractive.
On the topic of the ZEC price, I think we need to look at the project with our “investor” hats on to understand why it’s valued where it is and how we can improve the outlook. The price has been doing pretty much what I expected it to do over the past 2+ years, based on putting myself in the position of an outsider evaluating our prospects, and a lot of my forum posts have been calling out the problems I saw.
I think for ZEC to be valued higher investors would want to see (a) visible user adoption within a community that needs privacy/censorship-resistance, (b) a much-improved user/developer onboarding flow. Things I see as holding the price down are (c) a lack of acknowledgement of the problems from leaders (exceptions being Nick’s post and Josh’s post which raised my confidence in ZEC), (d) a lack of understanding of the issues I’ve raised within Zcash’s leadership, (e) a focus on technical upgrades that aren’t centered around usability and onboarding-flow (a focus on technical upgrades was absolutely the right strategy 5+ years ago but that’s not how things are valued anymore, aside from VCs funding new projects), and (f) decentralization that’s dividing us and causing waste rather than aligning our resources towards good adoption bets.
ZSAs will certainly help but we need much more emphasis on “the last mile” of getting ZEC wallets into peoples’ hands and on visibly marketing ZEC into actual use cases. IMO most of the price still comes from speculation, so we need to make the project look amazing to people going down the coinmarketcap list and doing ~1hr max. of research to decide what’s worth investing in.
That said, trying to read investors’ minds is bound to almost always be wrong in some ways… I think I’m decent at it given my returns over the last 8 years… but maybe coinholder polling would help a lot here.