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.
Part of Zcash
4 moments in this segment.
- — 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.
