Zcash is a cryptocurrency that offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and value of a transaction may remain private.
Zcash is based on peer-reviewed cryptographic research, and built by a security-specialized engineering team on an open source platform based on Bitcoin Core's battle-tested codebase. Our roadmap is designed to support long-term scalability of the network, and in particular to enable powerful privacy features that are needed by everyone who uses Zcash.
The first version of the Zcash protocol, Overwinter, was launched on October 29, 2016. The next major protocol upgrade, Sprout, is currently in development and is expected to be ready for public testing in early 2018.
Zcash uses cutting-edge cryptography to achieve strong privacy guarantees:
* Zero-knowledge proofs allow fully encrypted transactions to be confirmed as valid.
* Selective disclosure features give users the option to provide transaction details, for auditing or regulatory compliance.
The Zcash protocol is currently in development and subject to a formal process of peer review. Our implementation is open source and hosted at GitHub.
