The Zcash network is live!
Today the Zash protocol has launched. Zcash begins.
This is the first protocol of its kind. It is the accumulation of years of academic research, advanced engineering, and diligent security work.
Zcash is a group of scientists and hackers who came up with a way to combine blockchains for immutability with encryption for data security. These two things are separately well understood, important, and widely used, but they’ve never been put together before now. Zcash lets you put encrypted data into a blockchain. Blockchains as they currently exist, don’t offer much (or any) control over the disclosure of the data that you put on the blockchain. Any data that you put in there is visible to all users of the blockchain. Thus, Zcash makes blockchains useful for a whole range of applications.
Join the Network
If you visit the Zcash website you’ll find a download page where you’ll find an install guide. There, we will soon post an explainer video with instructions on installing the zcash software. Because the process requires use of the command-line, we hope users comfortable with trying the process will dive in with us. The more this community participates and contributors, the stronger the network!
We will post a short list of wallets and exchanges on our blog; this will include only the providers that we know of, who plan to host Zcash at launch.
For all users it is imperative that you evaluate the risks of your participation; Zcash is still an experiment. There are two blog posts in particular, aimed to make users aware of the slow-start mining & initial network, and software usability & hardware requirements.
We’ve also updated our website to host a security page, in our support section, which will inform users of any network issues or security updates.
We encourage our community to join the discussion and conversations on the Forum and Slack channel.