Zcash is the cryptocurrency launched in 2016 by the Electric Coin Company.
Zcash was designed around privacy-preserving transactions and uses zero-knowledge cryptography. Its protocol introduced zk-SNARKs, allowing a transaction to be verified without publicly revealing certain details such as the sender, recipient, or amount when shielded addresses are used.
The Electric Coin Company was originally known as the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company. Zcash grew out of the Zerocoin and Zerocash research projects, but it is a distinct cryptocurrency rather than a continuation of Bitcoin’s original codebase alone.
A common mix-up is treating every Zcash transaction as automatically private. Zcash supports both transparent addresses and shielded addresses, so privacy depends on the address types and transaction choices used. The project’s separate nonprofit, the Zcash Foundation, also supports the wider ecosystem.