Cover of ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin by Ryan Bethencourt

ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin

Book One of The Decentralized Revolution Series

By Ryan Bethencourt

Second edition, October 2026 · Paperback ISBN 9798269847306 · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

The story of Zcash is the story of privacy itself: the dream that financial transactions could be as private as a conversation whispered between friends.

ZERO follows that dream from the cypherpunk mailing list and David Chaum’s DigiCash to a six-station ceremony in October 2016, the Halo breakthrough, the January 2026 walkout that created ZODL and the day Grayscale’s Zcash ETF began trading on NYSE Arca.

On this page: What ZERO is about · Contents · Free excerpt · Why Ryan wrote it · Zcash in October 2026 · FAQ · About the author

What is ZERO about?

ZERO: The Zcash Revolution is Ryan Bethencourt’s narrative history of Zcash, the cryptocurrency that uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users encrypt the sender, receiver and amount of a payment. It runs from the cypherpunks and David Chaum’s DigiCash through the 2016 trusted setup ceremony and Halo to ZODL and Grayscale’s Zcash ETF. The second edition appeared in October 2026.

ZERO traces the dream of private digital money from the cypherpunk mailing list of the 1990s through the invention of zero-knowledge proofs, the creation of Zcash and the governance battles that tested it. It is a story of cryptographers, idealists and the tension between building new technology and the very human politics of the people who build it.

From David Chaum’s DigiCash to Zooko Wilcox’s long road to Zcash, from the trusted setup ceremonies to the Halo 2 breakthrough that ended the need for new ones, from the fights between the Electric Coin Company and the Zcash Foundation to ZODL’s seed round of more than $25 million, ZERO tells how a group of mathematicians and cypherpunks built financial privacy for the digital age.

The second edition carries the story through the events that reshaped Zcash in 2026: the Electric Coin Company team’s departure in January to form the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), Sean Bowe’s Project Tachyon, the Crosslink proposal at Shielded Labs, and the launch of Grayscale’s Zcash ETF (ZCSH) on NYSE Arca on August 25, 2026.

Book details

DetailZERO
TitleZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin
AuthorRyan Bethencourt
SeriesBook One of The Decentralized Revolution Series
EditionSecond edition, October 2026 (first edition, late 2025)
PaperbackISBN 9798269847306 (Amazon ASIN B0GFGQWKJJ)
KindleAmazon ASIN B0H66B36L7
StructurePrologue, 12 chapters in seven parts, Epilogue, six “How It Works” sidebars, sources and references
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
TopicsZcash, zero-knowledge proofs, zk-SNARKs, the cypherpunks, financial privacy, Monero, Halo, ZODL, the Zcash ETF

What you will learn

  • Where private money began. How Eric Hughes’s 1993 “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” and David Chaum’s blind signatures framed the dream of digital cash, and why DigiCash, the company Chaum founded in Amsterdam in 1989, went bankrupt in 1998.
  • Why Bitcoin was never anonymous. How a public ledger let Bitcoin work without a bank, and why that same ledger made tracing payments possible.
  • Zero-knowledge proofs, explained for non-mathematicians. From the 1985 idea of Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali of MIT and Charles Rackoff of the University of Toronto to the Zerocoin (2013) and Zerocash (2014) papers, with the Ali Baba cave analogy.
  • How Zcash was born. How Zooko Wilcox, who left the University of Colorado for DigiCash in 1996, led the team that turned Zerocash into a working currency, and how six participants generated its parameters on October 22 and 23, 2016, before launch on October 28. One of them, known as “John Dobbertin”, was revealed in 2022 to be Edward Snowden.
  • The trusted setup problem. Why the ceremony’s “toxic waste” was a counterfeiting risk rather than a theft risk, and how Halo (2019) and Halo 2, which arrived with the NU5 upgrade on May 31, 2022, ended the need for new ceremonies.
  • The Monero rivalry. Ring signatures versus zk-SNARKs, mandatory versus optional privacy, and two conferences with two cultures in June 2019.
  • The governance fights. The Founders’ Reward, the Zcash Foundation, the 2019 trademark dispute, the dev fund that followed, and the January 2026 walkout from the Electric Coin Company.
  • The 2025 to 2026 revival. The Zebra node, the Zashi wallet, ZEC’s autumn 2025 rally, ZODL’s seed round from investors including Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital and Coinbase Ventures, Project Tachyon, Crosslink and Grayscale’s Zcash ETF.
  • Why financial privacy matters. Viewing keys, exchange delistings, and the book’s argument that private money will follow the path of encryption on the web, from a regulated munition to everyday HTTPS.

Contents

ZERO has a Prologue, twelve chapters in seven parts and an Epilogue. Chapter titles are the book’s own; the one-line summaries are ours.

Prologue: A New Kind of Silence. Boulder, Colorado, October 2016: inside the hotel room where Zooko Wilcox ran one station of the ceremony that generated Zcash’s parameters.

Part I: The Cypherpunk Dream

  • Chapter 1: The Cypherpunk Spark. David Chaum’s blind signatures (1983), DigiCash (1989 to 1998), the cypherpunks, E-Gold, b-money and bit gold, and why Bitcoin was never anonymous.
  • Chapter 2: From Zero to Zerocash. Matthew Green’s Zerocoin (2013), practical zk-SNARKs and the Zerocash paper (2014).

Part II: The Genesis

  • Chapter 3: The Man with the Mohawk: Zooko Wilcox and the ECC. Zooko Wilcox’s road from DigiCash, Mojo Nation and Tahoe-LAFS to the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, founded in 2015.
  • Chapter 4: The Ceremony: Six Witnesses and a Blowtorch. The multi-party computation of October 22 and 23, 2016: six stations, Peter Todd’s mobile station in a rental car, and a pseudonymous participant later revealed as Edward Snowden.

Part III: The Crucible of Reality

  • Chapter 5: The First Year: Mania, Math, and Growing Pains. Launch on October 28, 2016, first trades near $2.3 million per coin, and early shielded payments that needed about 3 GB of memory to build.
  • Chapter 6: Foundations of Trust and Tension. The Founders’ Reward, the Zcash Foundation’s 2017 launch, the 2019 trademark fight and the dev fund that replaced the Founders’ Reward in 2020.

Part IV: The Mirror and the Breakthrough

  • Chapter 7: Ghost Rivals: Monero and the Mirror War. Monero and Zcash: ring signatures against zk-SNARKs, rival conferences in June 2019 and an uneasy coopetition.
  • Chapter 8: The ZK Revolution and the Halo Breakthrough. How Zcash’s cryptography spread to Ethereum and StarkWare, and how Halo (2019) and Halo 2 (NU5, 2022) ended the need for new trusted setups.

Part V: The Long Winter

  • Chapter 9: The Long Game: Delistings, View Keys, and Passing the Torch. Exchange delistings, viewing keys, the case for private money, and Zooko Wilcox stepping down as the Electric Coin Company’s CEO in December 2023.

Part VI: The Renaissance

  • Chapter 10: The 2025 Awakening: Zebra, Zashi, and the God Candle. The Zebra node, the Zashi wallet, the November 2024 halving and its lockbox, and ZEC’s autumn 2025 rally.
  • Chapter 11: The Exodus and the Birth of Zodl. The January 7, 2026 walkout from the Electric Coin Company, the Zodl wallet and ZODL’s seed round.

Part VII: Planetary Privacy

  • Chapter 12: Tachyon, Crosslink, and Wall Street’s First Privacy ETF. Project Tachyon, the proposed Crosslink upgrade, and Grayscale’s Zcash ETF (ZCSH), which began trading on August 25, 2026.

Epilogue and back matter

  • Epilogue: The Whisper and the Machine. October 2026: the book’s case for why privacy survived a decade of delistings and doubt.
  • About the Author
  • Sources & References

“How It Works” sidebars

  • Chaum’s Blind Signatures vs. Bitcoin’s Ledger (Chapter 1)
  • Zero-Knowledge Proofs and the Alibaba Cave (Chapter 2)
  • Multi-Party Computation and Toxic Waste (Chapter 4)
  • Ring Signatures (Monero) vs. zk-SNARKs (Zcash) (Chapter 7)
  • Sean Bowe’s Halo and Recursive Proofs (Chapter 8)
  • Project Tachyon and Crosslink (Chapter 12)

Read an excerpt from ZERO free (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Every book in The Decentralized Revolution Series is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so you can read, quote and share these passages with attribution. The three excerpts below, about 1,150 words in all, come from the Prologue, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the second edition. They were checked against primary sources, and passages that needed a correction are marked [lightly edited for accuracy].

Prologue: the night Zcash was born

The Prologue opens in a Boulder hotel room in October 2016, during the ceremony that generated the secret parameters Zcash needed before it could launch.

Zooko Wilcox paced nervously across the hotel room, careful not to trip over the tangle of wires at his feet. It was a cool night in October 2016 in Boulder, Colorado, and the small suite had been transformed into a high-tech command center. Laptops whirred on a desk cluttered with hard drives and strange gadgets, their LED lights blinking in the semi-darkness. Security cameras mounted on makeshift poles kept silent watch, their lenses trained on the room’s centerpiece: an isolated computer with its guts exposed, hard drive removed, never once connected to the internet. This was the heart of a secret ritual. And Wilcox, a slight man in his early forties with intense eyes, was about to oversee the birth of a new kind of money.

He pressed the laptop’s mute button for what felt like the hundredth time that night. A live group call was running, connecting this shadowy Boulder hotel room to five other locations around the world. On the screen, pixelated faces of fellow “ceremony” participants flickered in and out, friends and collaborators spread from Washington D.C. to Texas, even one who was literally on the road in Canada. They called it The Ceremony, and it was nothing short of a high-tech magic spell: a coordinated, multi-party computation to create the cryptographic keys for Zcash, a cryptocurrency designed to be private and untraceable.

Wilcox had waited years for this moment. As the CEO of the fledgling Zcash Company, he carried not just the weight of his investors’ expectations but the hopes of an entire community who believed in online privacy. Zcash was meant to be “Bitcoin with privacy,” a digital currency that could shield its users in perfect cryptographic silence. But first, the code needed something from the human world: a set of secret numbers, generated and then destroyed, to serve as the foundation of its privacy features. Generating those numbers required absolute secrecy, and that was why Wilcox and his team had gone to such extreme lengths tonight.

Every detail had been planned with almost paranoid precision. The participants in The Ceremony each controlled one fragment of the secret key, and none could see the others’ fragment. In Boulder, Wilcox’s station would receive data from one location, mix in its own secret piece, then pass the result along to the next. If any single part remained uncompromised (and everyone planned to destroy their piece once it was used) no attacker could recreate the full secret “toxic waste,” as they grimly nicknamed it. It was a delicate relay race of trust and cryptography.

[lightly edited for accuracy]

Excerpted from ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin by Ryan Bethencourt, Prologue, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Editor’s note: The ceremony ran on October 22 and 23, 2016, and Zcash’s genesis block was mined five days later, on October 28, 2016. One of the six participants, known publicly only as “John Dobbertin”, was revealed in April 2022 to be Edward Snowden.

The design rested on one property of the multi-party computation: the final parameters were safe if even one of the six participants destroyed their share of the secret. The danger was counterfeiting, not theft. Whoever held the whole secret could have minted fake ZEC, but could not have stolen coins or read anyone’s transactions.

Removing the need for that ritual became a long-running goal of Zcash research. The Orchard pool, which arrived with Halo 2 in the NU5 upgrade on May 31, 2022, needs no trusted setup at all, although the older Sapling pool still relies on parameters generated in 2018.

Chapter 1: the cypherpunks and the dream of digital cash

Chapter 1 goes back to the people who asked for private digital money long before Bitcoin existed.

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” In 1993, a mathematician named Eric Hughes wrote these words to begin A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, a rallying cry for a rising movement. Hughes and his fellow “cypherpunks” believed that technology, specifically cryptography, could protect individual freedom in a world of growing digital surveillance. They gathered on an email list (and in person over beer in San Francisco) to swap ideas and code. They were an eclectic crew of hackers, engineers, and dreamers, all bonded by a shared conviction: that personal privacy was worth fighting for with keyboards and cryptographic algorithms. In their view, math was a weapon of liberation.

One of the holy grails for the cypherpunks was digital cash: money that could be sent over computer networks as privately as passing a few bills under the table. […] If people could transact without being watched by banks or governments, financial privacy would become a reality. “Cypherpunks write code,” was their unofficial motto, and many of them set out to code this future into existence.

But the quest for private digital money didn’t start with the cypherpunks. A decade earlier, in the 1980s, an American cryptographer named David Chaum had already lit the spark. Chaum was a visionary, someone who looked at the emerging computer networks and foresaw the dangers to privacy. In 1983, he published a groundbreaking paper describing “blind signatures,” a cryptographic technique that could enable a form of digital currency that was anonymous. In simpler terms, Chaum figured out how to let you withdraw digital “coins” from a bank and spend them without the bank (or anyone else) knowing where you spent them. It was a brilliant solution to a problem most people hadn’t even realized existed yet.

Excerpted from ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter 1, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Editor’s note: The opening line is the first sentence of Eric Hughes’s “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”, dated March 9, 1993. “Cypherpunks write code” is also from the manifesto.

Chaum’s blind signatures solved privacy but kept a bank in the middle, and DigiCash, the company he founded in Amsterdam in 1989, went bankrupt in 1998. Bitcoin later removed the bank by making every payment public. In the book’s words, Bitcoin “achieved decentralization by sacrificing privacy.”

ZERO’s argument is that Zcash set out to keep both halves: no central issuer, and no public record of who paid whom.

Chapter 2: zk-SNARKs and the birth of Zerocash

Chapter 2 introduces the cryptography that made Zcash possible and the academic team that designed it.

The chapter follows Eli Ben-Sasson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Technion in Israel, whose group built working zk-SNARKs in 2013: short proofs that a computation is correct while revealing nothing else. Matthew Green saw that the tool could take his Zerocoin work much further, and the two teams joined forces. Their 2014 Zerocash design was a new coin rather than an add-on to Bitcoin, built to hide every payment’s sender, recipient and amount. It was a design on paper, and the academics who wrote it went back to teaching and research. The chapter ends on the question the rest of the book answers: who would build it.

Editor’s note: The Zerocash paper had seven authors: Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer and Madars Virza. It was published in 2014 and presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy that May.

Zerocash is the design Zcash was built from. A zk-SNARK compresses a long back-and-forth proof into a single proof a few hundred bytes long that any node can check in milliseconds, while learning nothing about the payment.

Zcash’s first shielded proofs were 296 bytes, but building one took about 3 GB of memory. That is why the 2018 Sapling upgrade, which let wallets build shielded payments with about 40 MB of memory, mattered so much.

The story continues through the ceremony, the first year’s mania, the Monero rivalry, Halo, the 2026 walkout and the Zcash ETF. The full story is in ZERO in paperback on Amazon, also available as a Kindle edition.

Why Ryan Bethencourt wrote ZERO

Ryan Bethencourt joined the Zcash community in mid-2025. ZERO began, in his words, as an experiment:

This book began as an experiment. I really wanted to read a narrative history of Zcash and the people who turned zero-knowledge proofs from chalkboards into living money […]. In parallel, I had been exploring frontier AI models, from vibe coding and biotech drug development to creative writing, and decided to see if I could co-write the book I wanted to read.

From the Author’s Note to ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin, second edition, October 2026, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Author’s Note says the book was inspired by Zooko Wilcox’s path from David Chaum’s DigiCash, before cryptocurrency existed, to his decades-long effort to make encrypted money real. It thanks Ryan’s friends Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan for backing private-money pioneers early. The experiment grew into The Decentralized Revolution Series.

Ryan came to the subject from more than a decade of building and funding frontier biotech companies. He co-founded IndieBio, the world’s largest seed-stage biotech accelerator, co-founded Wild Earth and led it as CEO, and has backed 180+ early-stage biotech, food-tech and longevity companies.

How the book was made. ZERO was co-written with frontier AI models under Ryan’s direction, as its Author’s Note discloses.

Where the Zcash story stands in October 2026

ZERO’s second edition ends in October 2026. These are the key facts as of October 20, 2026, each with its source, for readers who want the current state of the story.

  • The Zcash ETF. Grayscale’s Zcash ETF (ticker ZCSH) began trading on NYSE Arca on August 25, 2026, with Coinbase as custodian. Blockworks describes it as the first U.S. exchange-traded product offering spot ZEC exposure (Blockworks Q3 2026 report; Decrypt, August 25, 2026).
  • Shielded supply. On September 30, 2026, about 4.94 million ZEC, 29.1 percent of supply, was held in shielded pools. About 4.06 million of it sat in Ironwood, the replacement shielded pool that activated on July 28, 2026, at block 3,428,143, after a counterfeiting flaw was found in the Orchard pool (Blockworks Q3 2026 report).
  • The node software. The original zcashd node reached end of life on July 18, 2026. Node operators moved to the Zcash Foundation’s Zebra and to Zakura, a node built by Valar Group and Project Tachyon (Blockworks Q3 2026 report).
  • NU7. The newest network upgrade cuts Zcash’s target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds (ZIP 218). It activated on testnet in early October 2026, at block 4,465,026 (Crypto Briefing). It went live on mainnet on November 5, 2026, its target date, at block 3,543,405 (The Block, November 6, 2026).
  • Crosslink. Shielded Labs’ design for proof-of-stake finality on top of Zcash’s proof of work remained a proposed upgrade, not part of NU7 (Shielded Labs).
  • ZODL. The Electric Coin Company’s engineering team walked out on January 7, 2026. The Zashi wallet was renamed Zodl on February 16, 2026, and ZODL announced more than $25 million in seed funding on March 9, 2026 (ZODL, February 16, 2026; ZODL, March 9, 2026).

Read more on Grey Area Labs

New guides drawn from ZERO (2026)

  • Zcash NU7 explained: what NU7 changes (25-second blocks, the Sprout cutoff, the Network Sustainability Mechanism) and every Zcash upgrade since 2016.
  • Zcash Ironwood and the AI-assisted Orchard audit: how a 2026 AI-assisted audit found a counterfeiting flaw in Orchard, and how Ironwood answered it.
  • The Zcash ETF (ZCSH): what Grayscale’s fund holds, what it does not give holders, and the road from a Boulder hotel room to NYSE Arca.
  • Are privacy coins legal?: US and EU rules for Zcash and Monero as of late 2026, and what changes in the EU in 2027.
  • Zcash vs Bitcoin (publishing November 11): the same 21 million cap and halvings, but a ledger that can encrypt sender, receiver and amount.

Essential Zcash guides

Every guide in one place: Privacy and zero-knowledge cryptography: the Grey Area Labs guide.

ZERO: frequently asked questions

What is ZERO about?

ZERO: The Zcash Revolution is Ryan Bethencourt’s narrative history of Zcash, the cryptocurrency that uses zero-knowledge proofs to let users encrypt the sender, receiver and amount of a payment. It follows the cypherpunks and David Chaum’s DigiCash, the Zerocoin and Zerocash papers, the 2016 ceremony, the rivalry with Monero, Halo, the January 2026 walkout that created ZODL, and Grayscale’s Zcash ETF.

What changed in the second edition of ZERO?

The second edition, published in October 2026, refreshes the whole manuscript and carries the story through 2026: the Electric Coin Company team’s departure in January 2026 to form ZODL, Sean Bowe’s Project Tachyon, the proposed Crosslink upgrade, and the launch of Grayscale’s Zcash ETF (ZCSH) on NYSE Arca on August 25, 2026. The first edition was published in late 2025.

Does ZERO cover the Zcash ETF?

Yes. Chapter 12, “Tachyon, Crosslink, and Wall Street’s First Privacy ETF”, tells how Grayscale’s Zcash ETF came to trade on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH on August 25, 2026, with Coinbase as custodian. ZERO treats the fund as a moment in Zcash’s history, not as an investment recommendation.

Who is ZERO for?

ZERO is for anyone curious about the human story behind private money: newcomers who want to know what makes Zcash different, longtime Zcash users who want the full history, developers curious about zero-knowledge proofs, and readers who care about financial privacy. You do not need a background in cryptography or computer science. Each technical idea is explained in plain language, and six “How It Works” sidebars go deeper.

Is ZERO a technical book?

No. ZERO is narrative nonfiction for general readers. It explains the cryptography in plain language, with analogies such as Ali Baba’s cave for zero-knowledge proofs. Six short “How It Works” sidebars cover blind signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, ring signatures versus zk-SNARKs, Halo and recursive proofs, and Project Tachyon and Crosslink.

Can I quote ZERO?

Yes. ZERO is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). You may share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, if you credit the author, link the license, say whether you made changes and release adaptations under the same license. A suitable credit line is: Excerpted from ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin by Ryan Bethencourt, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Was ZERO written with AI?

Yes. The book’s Author’s Note says ZERO began as an experiment: Ryan Bethencourt wanted to read a narrative history of Zcash, had been exploring frontier AI models, and decided to see whether he could co-write the book with them. That experiment grew into The Decentralized Revolution Series. The excerpts on this page were checked against primary sources, and corrections are marked.

Does ZERO give investment advice?

No. ZERO is a narrative history. It mentions prices only as dated events in the story, such as ZEC’s first trades near $2.3 million per coin on launch day in October 2016, and it does not tell readers to buy or sell ZEC. Ryan Bethencourt discloses that he holds ZEC. Nothing on this page is financial advice.

About the author

Ryan Bethencourt is an author, biotech investor and founder who writes about decentralized systems and applied frontier technologies. He is the author of The Decentralized Revolution Series: ZERO (Zcash and zero-knowledge privacy), TAO (Bittensor and decentralized AI), LIGHT (Solana), PUNKS (NFTs and crypto art), DOGE (memecoins) and HYPE (decentralized finance), and of AGENT (AI agents and money), Book One of The Frontier Series. He co-founded IndieBio, the world’s largest seed-stage biotech accelerator, co-founded and led Wild Earth as CEO, and has backed 180+ early-stage biotech, food-tech and longevity companies. He studied molecular genetics at Warwick and bioscience enterprise at Cambridge and MIT. He writes Accelerated on Substack and publishes at Grey Area Labs. He joined the Zcash community in mid-2025.

Read Ryan Bethencourt’s full bio · All books, free excerpts and how to quote them

Disclosure: Ryan holds ZEC. ZERO was co-written with frontier AI models under his direction, as its Author’s Note discloses. Nothing here is financial advice.

Also in The Decentralized Revolution Series

From the same author: AGENT: AI, Money and the Rise of the Non-Human Economy, Book One of The Frontier Series, on AI agents that hold and spend money.

All books by Ryan Bethencourt.

Sources for this page

  1. Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”, March 9, 1993. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
  2. Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer and Madars Virza, “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin”, IACR ePrint 2014/349, 2014. https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/349
  3. Morgen Peck, “The Crazy Security Behind the Birth of Zcash, the Inside Story”, IEEE Spectrum, December 2, 2016. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-crazy-security-behind-the-birth-of-zcash
  4. Electric Coin Company, “Zcash begins”, October 28, 2016 (now hosted by ZODL). https://zodl.com/zcash-begins/
  5. Decrypt, “Edward Snowden Helped Create Zcash Privacy Coin”, April 27, 2022. https://decrypt.co/98870/edward-snowden-helped-create-zcash-privacy-coin
  6. Sean Bowe, Jack Grigg and Daira Hopwood, “Recursive Proof Composition without a Trusted Setup” (Halo), IACR ePrint 2019/1021, 2019. https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1021
  7. ZIP 252, “Deployment of the NU5 Network Upgrade”. https://zips.z.cash/zip-0252
  8. Zcash, “Sapling” network upgrade page (40 MB of memory for a Sapling payment). https://z.cash/upgrade/sapling/
  9. ZODL, “Zcash Wallet Zashi Is Becoming Zodl”, February 16, 2026; “ZODL Raises $25M+ in Seed Funding”, March 9, 2026. https://zodl.com/zodl-raises-25m-in-seed-funding/
  10. zcash/zcash, release v6.20.0 (zcashd’s last release, the NU6.2 Orchard fix), June 3, 2026. https://github.com/zcash/zcash/releases/tag/v6.20.0
  11. Blockworks Advisory, Zcash Token Holder Report, Q3 2026. https://blockworks.com/api/investor-report/zcash-token-holder-report-q3-2026/pdf
  12. Decrypt, “Grayscale Launches Zcash ETF Following Critical Privacy Flaw That Rocked the Cryptocurrency”, August 25, 2026. https://decrypt.co/376420
  13. ZIP 218, “25-second Block Target Spacing” (Draft); Cointelegraph, “Zcash targets November for NU7 mainnet upgrade with 25-second blocks”, September 18, 2026. https://zips.z.cash/zip-0218
  14. Shielded Labs, “Crosslink”. https://shieldedlabs.net/crosslink/

Last updated November 6, 2026. Changelog: November 6, 2026, NU7 mainnet activation added to the key facts. October 2026, page refreshed for the second edition (published title, clean Amazon links, contents, free excerpt, FAQ, corrected facts and dated October 2026 facts). March 23, 2026, page first published.

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