Zcash (ZEC): Private Payments Built on Zero-Knowledge Proofs
A capped proof-of-work coin that can hide payments
Zcash is a proof-of-work coin capped at 21 million, like Bitcoin, but it can hide a payment’s sender, receiver and amount using zero-knowledge proofs. 2026 brought a developer shake-up, an emergency fix and a new shielded pool.
1. From paper to currency
Zcash grew out of Zerocash, a 2014 paper by researchers at Johns Hopkins, MIT, the Technion and Tel Aviv University. A company led by Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, now the Electric Coin Company (ECC), launched the mainnet on October 28, 2016. The nonprofit Zcash Foundation built Zebra, an independent node.
In January 2026 the entire ECC staff quit over a governance dispute with the board of Bootstrap, ECC’s nonprofit owner, and regrouped as ZODL (Zcash Open Development Lab) under former ECC chief Josh Swihart. ZODL, the Zcash Foundation, Shielded Labs and others now share development. On the Crypto Nation map, ZEC is the city-hall tower of Zcash City.
2. How shielded payments work
Transparent addresses are public like Bitcoin’s, while shielded addresses hide the details. Shielded transactions carry zk-SNARKs, zero-knowledge proofs that a transaction follows the rules without revealing it, so the network checks only that amounts balance and nothing is spent twice. A viewing key can reveal chosen transactions to an auditor.
Blocks are mined with Equihash, a memory-hard proof-of-work algorithm, and rewards halve about every four years, capping supply at 21 million. The 2018 Sapling upgrade made shielded payments light enough for phones. The 2022 NU5 upgrade added the Orchard pool and Halo 2 proofs, removing the ‘trusted setup’, a ceremony whose secrets had to be destroyed.
3. A 2026 bug and a new pool
In late May 2026 researcher Taylor Hornby, auditing for Shielded Labs, found a flaw in Orchard’s proof circuit that could in theory allow undetected counterfeiting. A soft fork paused Orchard on June 2, and the NU6.2 hard fork applied a corrected circuit the next day. The turnstile, which tracks value between pools, showed no sign of exploitation.
On July 28 the NU6.3 ‘Ironwood’ upgrade opened a new, formally verified (mathematically checked) shielded pool, leaving Orchard withdrawal-only. NU7 went live on testnet in early October 2026 and targets mainnet on November 5. It would cut block spacing from 75 to 25 seconds and route part of fees into future block rewards.
4. Things to know
Because it can hide transactions, Zcash draws regulatory scrutiny. Major South Korean exchanges delisted so-called privacy coins between 2019 and 2021, and EU anti-money-laundering rules will bar crypto service providers from handling anonymity-enhancing coins from July 2027. Supporters say viewing keys allow compliance.
As the Orchard bug showed, flaws in advanced cryptography are hard to spot, and funding development from block rewards has long been debated, as have disputes between its organizations. Transparent payments are as visible as Bitcoin’s, so real privacy depends on using shielded features.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.