Zcash history: the coin that hides the amount
A research paper first
Zcash started as Zerocash, a 2014 paper by cryptographers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Tel Aviv University and the Technion. They showed that a blockchain could confirm a payment without revealing the sender, the recipient or the amount, using a zero-knowledge proof called a zk-SNARK. Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn built a company around the idea, now the Electric Coin Company.
October 2016: a launch at 3,191 dollars
The network went live on 28 October 2016. Only a handful of coins existed on day one, and buyers paid up to 3,191.93 dollars per ZEC, according to CoinGecko. That launch-day price remains the all-time high. Within weeks the price fell into the tens of dollars as mining added supply.
Two kinds of address
Zcash copies Bitcoin’s cap of 21 million coins and its halving schedule. The difference is the choice it gives you: a transparent address works like Bitcoin’s, while a shielded address hides the details. The second halving came in November 2024 and cut the block reward in half again.
The 2025 rally
For years ZEC traded far below its launch price; in July 2024 it touched 16.08 dollars. In autumn 2025 privacy came back into fashion, and ZEC rose tenfold in two months, from 40.55 dollars on 1 September to 404.54 dollars on 31 October, by Binance closing prices. By November 2026 it ranked tenth by market cap on CoinGecko.