Privacy coins keep amounts and wallet addresses confidential. If you send or receive ZEC tokens, you can choose to shield your wallet address and the amount.
Zcash is also different from most privacy coins. While these cryptocurrencies typically only offer confidential transactions, Zcash has transparent transactions available. If you choose that option, your wallet address and the transaction amount will be public information.
Where Zcash came from
In 2013, Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew Green and some of his graduate students came up with the idea for Zcash (at the time called "Zerocash"). It was originally going to be a privacy extension to Bitcoin (BTC -3.87%), but Bitcoin's core developers weren't on board. Zcash's developers ended up building the coin on the original Bitcoin code base.
The team behind the Zcash protocol started Zcash Company, recruited CEO Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, and raised more than $3 million from venture capitalists. (Highlighting the importance of privacy, ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden claims to have played a role in Zcash's beginnings as one of six people who collectively generated the first Zcash public address prior to the network's launch.) They launched Zcash on Oct. 28, 2016.
Zcash Company later rebranded as the Electric Coin Company. Along with the nonprofit Zcash Foundation, it manages the Zcash protocol and blockchain.
How Zcash works
Zcash has two types of wallet addresses: z-addresses and t-addresses. A z-address is a private address, and a t-address is a transparent address. These addresses are interoperable, and users can choose the type they want to use for each transaction. That means there are four types of transactions, depending on what the sender and recipient use:
- Private: The sender and recipient use z-addresses. Both addresses and the transaction amount are private.
- Deshielding: The sender uses a z-address and the recipient uses a t-address. The sender's address is private. The recipient's address and the amount they received are public.
- Shielding: The sender uses a t-address and the recipient uses a z-address. The sender's address and the amount they're sending are public. The recipient's address is private.
- Public: The sender and recipient use t-addresses. Their addresses and the amount are public.
With z-addresses, Zcash encrypts the address and amount. There's a record of the transaction on the blockchain, showing that it occurred and that fees were paid. The details are encrypted using zero-knowledge proofs, a proof construction where one can prove possession of certain information without revealing the information itself.
The owner of a z-address can choose to disclose the address and transaction details with trusted third parties. This allows them to fulfill auditing and compliance requirements if necessary.
Zcash relies on cryptocurrency mining to add transactions to the blockchain and to mint new tokens. It uses a proof-of-work mining algorithm that requires miners to solve complex equations to earn the right to validate a block of transactions. The miner that solves the equation first gets to add a block and receive a block reward.
