Zcash

Development work on Zcash began in 2013 by Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green and some of his graduate students.[5] The development was completed by the for-profit Zcash Company, led by Zooko Wilcox, a Colorado-based computer security specialist and cypherpunk.[5] The Zcash Company raised over $3 million from Silicon Valley venture capitalists to complete development of Zcash.[5]

Zcash was first mined in late October 2016.[9] The initial demand was high, and within a week Zcash coins were trading for five thousand dollars a piece.[9] Ten percent of all coins mined for the first four years were to be allotted to the Zcash Company, its employees, the investors, and the non-profit Zcash Foundation.[5]

On March 1, 2018, Ariel Gabizon, an employee of the Zcash Company, discovered a critical bug which could have allowed an attacker to create an infinite amount of counterfeit Zcash.[10][11] Gabizon shared this discovery with only three other employees, including CEO Zooko Wilcox.[10][11] On October 28, 2018, the fix for this issue was covertly included in the Sapling network upgrade to the Zcash network.[10][11]

On February 21, 2019, the "Zcash Company" announced a re-branding as the Electric Coin Company (ECC).[12] In their blog post, the company claims that they had been calling themselves the "Zcash Company" but that their legal name has always been the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, LLC and that they will now be known as the ECC.[12]

On September 24, 2019, the ECC announced that Zcash is compliant with all requirements arising from the FATF recommendations in a company blog post titled "How Zcash is Compliant with the FATF Recommendations".[13] ECC's blog post claims that their virtual asset is more compliant than most other virtual assets as they implement the "Travel Rule" requirement.[13]

On May 19, 2020, a paper titled "Alt-Coin Traceability"[14] investigated the privacy of both Zcash and Monero. This paper concluded that "more academic research is needed in Zcash overall" and that the privacy guarantees of Zcash are "questionable". The paper claimed that since the current heuristics from a 2018 Usenix Security Symposium paper entitled "An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash"[7] still continue today that the result is making Zcash less anonymous and more traceable.

On June 8, 2020, Chainalysis added support for Zcash to their Chainalysis Reactor and "Know Your Transaction" (KYT) technologies.[15] This permits Chainalysis to trace and provide transaction values and at least the sender or receiver address for over 99% of Zcash activity.[15] Chainalysis explains that it is able to accomplish this since most Zcash users do not use privacy-enhancing features.[15] Chainalysis also cites a research paper by the RAND corporation[16] which revealed that less than 0.2% of the cryptocurrency addresses on the dark web were Zcash addresses.[15]

On October 12, 2020, the ECC announced a new non-profit 501(c)3 organization called the Bootstrap Project (Bootstrap) in a company blog post titled "ECC’s owners to donate ECC".[17] A majority of the investors and owners of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company LLC (ECC) have agreed to donate the ECC company as the wholly owned property of Bootstrap.[17] ECC's blog post claims that nothing will change within the company other than the ownership[17] including the Board of Directors.[17] On October 27, 2020, ECC announced that its shareholders have officially voted in favor of donating 100 percent of the company's shares to Bootstrap.[18]

• Legality of bitcoin by country
• Zerocoin protocol
• zk-SNARKs

• Official website
• Official Electric Coin Company website
• Zcash Foundation