Zcash (ZEC)

The ZEC cryptocurrency belonging to the ZCash project is rapidly gaining popularity. Find out everything about how cryptocurrency was created, how it works and how to mine it. 

ZCash - what is it?

ZCash is a payment network project based on blockchain technologies. It has its own cryptocurrency ZEC and open source code, the so-called opensource. The incentive for the creation of the coin was the desire to create a private cryptocurrency. The Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, led by Zooko Wilcox, is responsible for the development of the project. The project started in 2016.

ZCash (ZEC)

The ZEC is the main cryptocurrency of the project. It belongs to the group of private coins, ie private cryptocurrencies that hide information about the addresses of senders and recipients. Anonymity was ensured thanks to the use of the ZK-Snark zero knowledge protocol. Zec stands out from the group of private coins with the possibility of conducting a public transaction. 

The ZEC user can choose from two types of addresses. One of them t-addr is a public address, the other one z-addr is a private address. When using a public address all data is public, while using z-addr the sender and recipient addresses are private. However, there is a special preview that allows selective transparency. The possibility of using public addresses is also controversial, especially by supporters of anonymous payments who do not fully recognize the ZEC as a private cryptocurrency.

The founders of the project themselves believe that thanks to the possibility of hiding addresses, the cryptocurrency is more transparent. Thanks to this, there is no need for selectivity and blocking of coins that are suspected of fraudulent use in the past. All ZEC coins are equal. It is worth mentioning that 95% of transactions in the ZEC blockchain are made at public addresses. 

Technically, a cryptocurrency works in the same way as BTC. There are 21 million coins in total, which is exactly the same as   Bitcoin . Currently, almost 12 million ZEC are in circulation. The current price is around $ 106.21 and the daily volume is $ 225 million, making it 71 rank in terms of market capitalization.

Digging the ZEC

The ZEC cryptocurrency is based on the Proof of Work algorithm. This means that it is mined in the same way as Bitcoin. By solving complex mathematical calculations, the so-called miners who mine new blocks and sustain the network, charging additional transaction approval fees. The average time to dig a new block is 2.5 minutes and the current reward for miners is 3.125 ZEC. 

It is worth mentioning that 10% of each block award is collected for the development of the ZCash Foundation. Additionally, up to the first halving, the award is reduced by 20% of the remuneration for authors. Both of these issues raise a lot of controversy and do not necessarily appeal to users and miners. They even led to a hard fork and the creation of the ZClassic ZCL, which basically does not differ from the ZEC except for the abovementioned fees. The algorithm used in the ZEC was to be resistant to ASIC mining. This was to prevent possible network centralization by using much more computing power. However, there have been ZEC ASIC excavators on the market since 2018. After all, much of the mining is still done using GPUs.