Zcash

Market Overview Spot Market No. of Cryptocurrencies Bitcoin Treasuries BNB Treasuries Exchange Inflows/Outflows Disclaimer: This page may contain affiliate links. CoinMarketCap may be compensated if you visit any affiliate links and you take certain actions such as signing up and transacting with these affiliate platforms. Please refer to Affiliate Disclosure Zcash is a decentralized cryptocurrency focused on privacy and anonymity. It uses the zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proof technology that allows nodes on the network to verify transactions without revealing any sensitive information about those transactions. Contrary to a common misunderstanding, the majority of cryptocurrencies on the market, including Bitcoin (BTC ), are not anonymous, but rather pseudonymous ; while they do not explicitly reveal the identities of their users, each user has their own public address or addresses which can be traced back to them via the methods of data science and blockchain forensics. Zcash transactions, on the other hand, still have to be relayed via a public blockchain, but unlike pseudonymous cryptocurrencies, ZEC transactions by default do not reveal the sending and receiving addresses or the amount being sent. There is an option, however, to reveal this data for the purposes of auditing or regulatory compliance. Zcash was first released on October 28, 2016, and it was originally based on Bitcoin’s codebase. Zcash was founded in 2016 by cypherpunk, computer security expert and entrepreneur Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn. He is also the founder of the for-profit Electronic Coin Company (ECC), which manages the development of Zcash. Wilcox-O’Hearn has spent more than 25 years in the industry of cryptography and information security and has contributed to a number of projects, including the now-defunct electronic money firm DigiCash, peer-to-peer data storing software Mojo Nation and the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store filesystem. He also founded Least Authority Enterprises, a technology company focused on improving digital security and preserving the fundamental right to privacy, and co-invented the BLAKE3 cryptographic hash function. Zcash’s main advantage lies in its optional anonymity, which allows for a level of privacy unattainable with regular, pseudonymous cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum . ZEC transactions can be sent in two ways: transparent and shielded. Transparent transactions work in about the same way as in Bitcoin , whose codebase Zcash was originally based on: they are sent between public addresses and are recorded on an immutable public ledger (the blockchain). All essential information about these transactions is available online for anyone to see, including the sending and receiving addresses and the amount sent. These public transactions do not reveal user identities in an overt manner: the only identifiers an outside observer can access from the blockchain are public addresses. However, through the efforts of data scientists and law enforcement over recent years, the methods of blockchain analysis have been developed to the point where an interested party can fairly reliably connect a public address on a blockchain to the real-world identity of its owner, essentially making private transactions impossible. Shielded ZEC transactions, on the other hand, leverage the technology of zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, or zk-SNARKs , in order to enable completely anonymous transactions to be sent over a public immutable blockchain. The fact that the transaction has happened is recorded on the ledger, but the sending and receiving addresses and the amount sent is not revealed to the public. This allows Zcash to offer its users the right to privacy while still enjoying the advantages of a decentralized, permissionless digital currency. The miner subsidy goes to the miner who has mined the latest block and the founders’ reward is distributed between Electronic Coin Company (ECC) founders,

zcashd is deprecated and will not support NU6.3; its automatic End-of-Support halt is estimated for July 18th 2026 at block height 3417100, after which every node shuts down (NU6.3 mainnet activation follows around July 28th). If you do not need the zcashd wallet, migrate to Zebra now. If you depend on the zcashd wallet, start testing Zallet immediately. See the End of Life page for the full timeline and migration guidance. Initially based on Bitcoin's design, Zcash has been developed from the Zerocash protocol to offer a far higher standard of privacy and anonymity. It uses a sophisticated zero-knowledge proving scheme to preserve confidentiality and hide the connections between shielded transactions. More technical details are available in our Protocol Specification. This repository hosts the zcashd software, a Zcash consensus node implementation. It downloads and stores the entire history of Zcash transactions. Depending on the speed of your computer and network connection, the synchronization process could take several days. The zcashd code is derived from a source fork of Bitcoin Core. The code was forked initially from Bitcoin Core v0.11.2, and the two codebases have diverged substantially. This release is considered deprecated 16 weeks after the release day. There is an automatic deprecation shutdown feature which will halt the node some time after this 16-week period. The automatic feature is based on block height. The Zebra project offers a different Zcash consensus node implementation, written largely from the ground up. Please see our user guide for instructions on joining the main Zcash network. :blue book: See the documentation at the ReadTheDocs for help and more information. :incoming envelope: Ask for help on the Zcash forum. :speech balloon: Join our community on the Zcash Global Discord. 🧑‍🎓: Learn at ZecHub Currently, Zcash is only officially supported on Debian and Ubuntu. See the Debian / Ubuntu build page for detailed instructions.