During the initial days of Bitcoin, the digital currency was considered to be anonymous in nature. People believed that bitcoin transactions can never be tracked, making it an ideal currency for illegitimate transactions and dealings. However, it was later established that bitcoin transactions are pseudonymous at best and not completely anonymous. However, this could soon be a thing of the past. ZCash is the latest kid on the block that claims to be completely anonymous.
Currently in alpha, ZCash’s source code is available for download on Github. The new cryptocurrency is a derivative of previously known altcoin, Zerocoin. According to the creator of ZCash, Zooko Wilcox it is a perfectly untraceable digital currency which uses zero-knowledge proof protocol. While incorporating most of the security features of Bitcoin, ZCash allows users to keep their transactions completely anonymous and choose with whom they want to share the transaction details with.
According to WIRED, a tech news publication which tried out ZCash prototype, the product is far from finished at the moment. The alpha source code of ZCash doesn’t seem to have the GUI fixed yet. In order to set up Zcash, the WIRED team had to go through a not so simple process using the command line.
While Bitcoin follows the open source, community driven not for-profit model, ZCash is just the opposite. Working on a for-profit model, 10 percent of the proceeds from mining will go to the company and another one percent will be directed towards a non-profit organization run by ZCash and Zooko Wilcox.
ZCash currently has three investors onboard. They are Barry Silbert from Digital Currency Group, Roger Ver from Bitcoin.com and Naval Ravikant, a seasoned investor who has invested in the likes of Uber and Twitter. Put together, the company has so far received $715,000.
Monero is another such cryptocurrency which offers private blockchain feature. Monero is built using the modified Cryptonight proof of work protocol. While Monero is already available, one has to wait for at least another six months for ZCash to become functional.