Zcash

Zcash is a cryptocurrency launched on 28 October 2016 that is designed for private peer-to-peer payments. It addresses the problem that most blockchains expose transaction details — sender, receiver, and amount — to anyone who looks, which can be a concern for individuals and organizations where financial confidentiality matters. Zcash aims to let users transact without revealing that information while still allowing the network to confirm that no coins are being created fraudulently.

Zcash runs on its own Proof-of-Work blockchain using the Equihash consensus algorithm, where miners compete to add blocks, with the network recording an average block time of roughly 74.9 seconds over the most recent 24-hour period and producing 1,153 blocks in that window. Privacy is achieved through zero-knowledge proofs — specifically the Halo construction within its Orchard shielded pool — which allow the network to verify that a transaction is valid without learning anything about the amounts or the parties involved. ZEC is the native token used to pay transaction fees and to reward miners who secure the chain.

Transaction fees are paid by users in ZEC each time they send a transaction; the network recorded fees of 32,956 USD over the trailing 30 days and 593,476 USD over the trailing 12 months, with a 30-day annualized fee run-rate of 400,964.67 USD. The 24-hour median transaction fee was 0.026657 USD, while the 24-hour average was 2,683.32 USD, a gap that reflects a small number of high-value transactions skewing the mean. Protocol revenue — the portion of fees the protocol itself retains rather than passing to miners — is recorded as zero USD across the trailing 24 hours, 30 days, and 12 months, meaning the protocol does not capture a fee share; all fee income flows to miners. As a result, fee-based valuation ratios such as the market-cap-to-fees ratio of 33,205.24 and the fee yield of 0.003012 percent reflect the economics of the miner network rather than any protocol treasury.