Zcash
- Ticker
- ZEC
- Category
- Privacy
- Risk profile
- Volatile
What it is
A payments chain that offers two kinds of address — transparent, which behaves like Bitcoin, and shielded, where a zero-knowledge proof validates a transfer without revealing sender, receiver or amount.
Why this risk level
- A shielded transaction proves to the network that it is valid and balanced without publishing what it contains, which is a different approach from mixing transactions together to obscure them
- Privacy is opt-in, so the size of the shielded pool matters: value moved between a transparent and a shielded address leaves a visible edge, and a mostly-transparent chain gives shielded users a smaller crowd to blend into
- ZEC pays fees and is the transferred asset; the same coin can sit in either kind of address, and the choice of address is what determines what the chain reveals
A plain-English risk overview for education, not investment advice. Risk profiles describe the asset's own characteristics, not a price forecast — always do your own research before buying.
Other coin guides
Aave AAVEVolatileA decentralised lending protocol where deposits sit in shared pools and borrowers take overcollateralised loans against assets they lock, with interest rates set by how much of a pool is in use.Algorand ALGOVolatileA smart-contract network whose consensus draws a fresh random committee for every block and finalises it on the spot, so the chain never reorganises and confirmations are not a waiting game.Aptos APTVolatileA proof-of-stake layer-1 launched in October 2022 by engineers from Meta's abandoned Diem project, built around the Move programming language and an execution engine that processes independent transactions in parallel rather than one after another.Arbitrum ARBVolatileAn optimistic rollup that executes transactions off the Ethereum main chain and posts the results back to it, so users pay Ethereum-level security costs only once per batch.Avalanche AVAXVolatileA proof-of-stake smart-contract platform designed around fast transaction finality and the ability for projects to run their own separate, application-specific chains.Bitcoin BTCEstablishedThe original cryptocurrency and still the largest by market value, with over fifteen years of continuous operation and no successful attack on its core network.