Zcash
A chronological archive of Zcash (ZEC) — the privacy cryptocurrency built on zero-knowledge proofs. From the Zerocoin and Zerocash papers out of Johns Hopkins, through the legendary multi-party "Ceremony" that bootstrapped its zk-SNARKs, the 2016 mainnet launch, the Sapling upgrade, the Founders' Reward fight, and Halo 2 finally removing the trusted setup — to the 2025–26 privacy-coin rally.
A chronological documentary of 18 moments spanning 2013–2025 on Loreline.
last updated 2026-07-16
Eras
- The Cryptographic Roots — Before there was a coin there were two papers. Cryptographers at Johns Hopkins design Zerocoin and then Zerocash — schemes to hide who paid whom, and how much, using zero-knowledge proofs. A for-profit company forms to turn the research into real money.
- Launch & The Ceremony — To make its zk-SNARKs trustworthy, Zcash needs public parameters generated by a secret no single person can know. The answer is "The Ceremony" — a multi-party computation across six locations that destroys its own "toxic waste." Then, on October 28, 2016, the first block is mined and the price goes wild.
- Maturing the Protocol — Sapling makes shielded payments fast enough for a phone. The company rebrands as the Electric Coin Company, Sean Bowe unveils the Halo breakthrough, and the original Founders' Reward gives way — after a bruising governance fight — to a new dev fund at the first halving.
- No More Trust & The Rally — Halo 2 lands in the NU5 upgrade and the trusted setup is gone for good. Snowden is revealed as a secret ceremony participant, exchanges delist privacy coins under regulatory pressure — and then, in 2025–26, ZEC rallies hard as the privacy narrative returns.
- — May 2013 — the Zerocoin protocol is proposed. Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Christina Garman, and Aviel Rubin of Johns Hopkins publish Zerocoin — a scheme to anonymise cryptocurrency payments without a trusted third party, by "minting" and "spending" coins so their history is erased. It is the academic ancestor of Zcash.
- — May 2014 — the Zerocash paper introduces zk-SNARKs to money. "Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin" is presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Using zk-SNARKs, it hides sender, recipient, and amount all at once — the direct technical basis for Zcash.
- — 2015 — the Zcash company is founded with Zooko as CEO. Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn leads the for-profit Zerocoin Electric Coin Company to build a production cryptocurrency from the Zerocash research, raising over $3 million from investors including Naval Ravikant.
- — October 2016 — "The Ceremony": the trusted setup. To generate the zk-SNARK public parameters, participants in six locations jointly compute and then destroy pieces of a master secret ("toxic waste") so no one can ever counterfeit coins. The multi-party ceremony is famously documented by journalist Morgen Peck and dramatised by Radiolab.
- — October 28, 2016 — Zcash mainnet launches. The first Zcash blocks are mined on October 28, 2016. Amid extreme launch scarcity and speculation, ZEC spikes to an all-time intraday high near $5,941 the next day before collapsing — one of the wildest launch days in crypto history.
- — Watch — the Zcash Ceremony (Electric Coin Company). The Electric Coin Company's own short film on the trusted-setup ceremony — the multi-party computation, the "toxic waste," and the lengths participants went to so no one could ever forge the parameters.
- — Watch — "Forget Bitcoin. Meet Zcash" (Fortune). A Fortune Magazine explainer from around launch on what made Zcash different from Bitcoin: optional, cryptographically guaranteed privacy via zero-knowledge proofs.
- — October 2018 — the Sapling upgrade. Sapling activates at block 419,200, drastically improving shielded transactions: proof-generation memory drops from over 3 GB to about 40 MB and time falls from minutes to seconds, finally making private payments practical on a phone.
- — Watch — Zcash shielded transactions explained (ZecHub). A walkthrough of how shielded (z-address) transactions work versus transparent (t-address) ones — the dual model at the heart of Zcash and what zk-SNARKs actually hide.
- — February 2019 — the Electric Coin Company. The Zcash Company rebrands as the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the entity that continues to lead Zcash core development alongside the non-profit Zcash Foundation.
- — September 2019 — Sean Bowe announces Halo. ECC researcher Sean Bowe introduces Halo — the first practical recursive zero-knowledge proof composition without a trusted setup. It is a long-sought cryptography breakthrough that points the way to removing Zcash's dependence on the ceremony.
- — November 2020 — first halving ends the Founders' Reward. At Zcash's first halving, the Canopy upgrade ends the original "Founders' Reward" and replaces it — after the contentious ZIP 1014 vote — with a four-year dev fund: 80% of the block reward to miners, and 20% split among Zcash Community Grants, ECC, and the Zcash Foundation.
- — 2022 — Snowden revealed as a secret ceremony participant. Zcash Media confirms that Edward Snowden secretly took part in the 2016 trusted-setup ceremony under the pseudonym "John Dobbertin," alongside others such as Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd — a detail kept hidden for six years.
- — May 2022 — NU5 / Orchard activates Halo 2, killing the trusted setup. Network Upgrade 5 deploys the Orchard shielded pool built on the Halo 2 proving system (block 1,687,104). It permanently removes the need for any trusted setup and enables recursive proofs for future scalability — the goal Zcash had chased since the Ceremony.
- — Watch — Halo 2: SNARKs without trusted setups (Dystopia Labs). An accessible explainer of Halo 2 and recursive proofs — the breakthrough that let Zcash remove the trusted setup entirely in the NU5 / Orchard upgrade.
- — 2024 — privacy-coin delistings hit ZEC. Exchanges including OKX delist privacy-coin trading pairs such as ZEC in early 2024, part of a broad wave driven by AML/KYC regulatory pressure — the most privacy-coin delistings since 2021, following earlier moves in Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
- — 2025 — halving and a major ZEC rally. Zcash undergoes its scheduled November 2025 halving amid a privacy-coin "rotation," and ZEC rallies sharply — reportedly more than 800% over the year, briefly overtaking Monero's privacy-coin market cap and drawing renewed institutional attention.
- — Watch — Zooko: "Zcash, unstoppable private money" (TOKEN2049). Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn at TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025 making the case for Zcash as "encrypted Bitcoin" — private, fungible digital cash — during the privacy-coin resurgence.
Full text archive: /loreline-text/zcash.md
