Zcash: A Cryptocurrency That Offers Selective Transparency Of Transactions

While Bitcoin continues to rule the cryptocurrency ecosystem, several altcoins have surfaced which could be potential competitors to the dominant digital currency.

A new Bitcoin alternative – Zcash – has recently emerged which is being dubbed as ‘the perfectly untraceable digital money’.

Zooko Wilcox, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zcash, along with his team launched the first public alpha release of Zcash, Wired reported. It is a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that offers privacy and “selective transparency” of transactions using advanced cryptography. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private.

Based on “zero-knowledge proof” concept, Zcash offers the same benefits as bitcoin such as no one can counterfeit Zcash, or double spend the same Zcash “coin”. However, the zero-knowledge feature allows any spender or receiver to keep their Zcash payment entirely secret.

“Our zero-knowledge proving scheme makes it possible to hide values and other identifying information from the public. Using advanced cryptographic techniques, users simply prove that the values balance and that they are authorized to spend such value”, the website explains.

Zcash published its source code on Github last week, and is now allowing anyone to test the software. In an interview with Wired, Wilcox pointed out that the data moving on the Zcash network doesn’t represent actual money yet – only a “test net” that’s designed to fix the bug in the system before anyone makes investments in the cryptocurrency. According to him, the “real money” launch of Zcash is likely still close to six months away. 

“This Technology Preview release is solely for other developers and entrepreneurs around the world, who can help us inspect, debug, and improve the technology and who can learn how it works and how they can use it”, the company said in a blog post.

Wired further noted that Zcash is launching as a for-profit company. For its initial 4 years online, a portion of every mined Zcash coin will go to Zcash company and a smaller portion to a non-profit Wilcox is creating to monitor the Zcash code and community longterm. Wilcox intends 10 percent of Zcash’s currency to be paid for the company, and 1 percent to go towards the non-profit.