Precio, gráfico y análisis de Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash launched in 2016 from an academic project, and its contribution is a practical one: it made zero-knowledge proofs work at scale on a public blockchain years before that technique became fashionable elsewhere. The point was privacy, but the cryptography has since influenced a great deal beyond it.

How it works

Zcash forked Bitcoin’s basic design and added shielded addresses. A transaction between shielded addresses is recorded on the chain, but sender, recipient and amount are encrypted; a zero-knowledge proof demonstrates the transaction is valid — that the money exists and is not being spent twice — without revealing any of those details. Transparent addresses also exist and behave like Bitcoin’s, which is why privacy here is a choice rather than a default.

Supply

Zcash follows Bitcoin’s monetary shape closely: a hard cap of 21 million ZEC, issued through mining, with the block reward halving on a fixed schedule. For its first years a portion of each block was directed to founders and later to a development fund, which is a meaningful difference from Bitcoin and a long-running source of debate in its community.

What to watch

The share of supply held in shielded addresses is the metric that matters. Privacy in a system like this depends on the size of the anonymity set: if few transactions are shielded, those that are stand out. Also watch exchange listings — several venues in several jurisdictions have delisted privacy coins in response to regulatory pressure, which affects liquidity directly.

Where it is used

Zcash is used where financial privacy is the requirement, and it is worth saying that this is an ordinary need rather than a suspicious one: salaries, business payments and personal balances are not usually public information.

The risks are concrete. Regulatory hostility toward privacy-preserving assets is real and has already cost Zcash access to venues, which can leave holders with thinner liquidity than the market capitalisation implies. Its shielded pool is used by a minority of transactions, so the privacy it offers is weaker in practice than in principle. And the cryptography, while heavily reviewed, is complex enough that flaws have been found and patched before.