No, that was part of their copy of Bitcoin emision scedule and slow that down first month. Combined with huge promotion for at least a year prior to launch. Huge hype formed that pushed price of coins skyhigh. First trades were made for 2000 BTC per ZEC. It is totally normal those prices will never get reach again. ZEC is trying to find bottom now. Question is when will that happened.
That explains why Zcash went all the way down the drain a few months after launch. Not to mention, 2018's bear market had a negative impact over most cryptocurrencies' prices (including Zcash). Considering that Zcash has no other innovative technology that would keep it on top of its competitors, most people have lost interest in the coin. With many ZEC forks out there, why would anyone invest in Zcash?
I'll be interesting to see what happens after the founder's reward period is over by October 2020. Without a constant source of income for the Electric Coin Company (ECC), I wonder how will Zcash remain alive for the foreseeable future. The community could continue to work on it though, but without the company's collaboration I doubt that the cryptocurrency will be successful anytime soon. If Zcash wants to remain alive within the mainstream world, it's going to need to adopt new features and technologies not found elsewhere. For instance, Zcash could become the first cryptocurrency to adopt ZK-STARKS (
not a typo of ZK-SNARKS) in order to eliminate the trusted setup once and for all. If ZEC successfully achieves this before other Zero-Knowledge Proof coins, then it'll in the lead for a very long time.
Since Zcash has the same limited supply as Bitcoin, it has all the probability of increasing in price within the future. It just needs demand from people in the mainstream world to achieve prices higher than $30 per coin (current price). Without demand, you cannot expect ZEC or any other cryptocurrency to go up in price across the crypto market. With just 8 million coins in circulation right now, I believe that Zcash is just undervalued. I was lucky not to buy Zcash when it was in its ATHs of over $5k per coin. If I would've held onto my ZEC until today, I would've lost a considerable amount of money. Thanks to the bear market, people can now acquire ZEC at the lowest prices possible.
Nonetheless, time will tell us what will be the outcome of Zcash's developments within the crypto space. If it never innovates, than I'm afraid that it'll be a forgotten cryptocurrency in the future. Hope that won't be the case, and Zcash will be able to truly stand against its competitors within the mainstream world. If successful, then hitting $5k per coin would be an easy target for Zcash as long as Bitcoin is experiencing huge gains across the crypto market. Despite this, no one knows what will be the next price of each cryptocurrency in the future. All we could do is wait (and spend some coins while we're at it) to see what happens by then. Just my opinion