The History of Zcash: From the Zerocash Paper to Today

Zcash didn't start as a company idea — it started as an academic paper. Here's how a piece of cryptography research became one of the longest-running privacy-focused cryptocurrencies.

2014 — The Zerocash paper

In 2014, a team of cryptographers and computer scientists — Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza — published "Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin" at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper showed, for the first time, how zk-SNARKs could be used to build a Bitcoin-like ledger where transaction amounts and participants could stay fully private while still being verifiable. It's the direct academic ancestor of Zcash's shielded transactions.

October 2016 — Mainnet launch

Zcash launched on October 28, 2016, built by the Electric Coin Company (ECC) under founder Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, with several of the original Zerocash paper authors involved as founding scientists. It was the first major cryptocurrency to bring zk-SNARKs to a live network.

2017 — Zcash Foundation founded

The Zcash Foundation was established as an independent, member-directed nonprofit dedicated to protocol research, protocol stewardship, and financial privacy advocacy — separate from the for-profit Electric Coin Company.

October 2018 — Sapling

The Sapling network upgrade cut the time and memory needed to create a shielded transaction from minutes to seconds, making shielded transactions practical on phones for the first time. See our glossary entry on Sapling.

November 2020 — First halving

Zcash's first halving roughly cut the block reward, and the "Founders Reward" that had funded ECC and the Foundation during Zcash's first four years expired, replaced by a new on-chain development fund structure.

May 2022 — NU5 and Orchard

The NU5 network upgrade introduced Orchard, a new shielded pool built on the Halo 2 proving system — removing the need for a trusted setup ceremony — along with Unified Addresses.

January 2026 — ECC team departure and ZODL

In January 2026, the engineering and product team at Electric Coin Company left the company following a governance dispute with Bootstrap, the nonprofit board overseeing ECC. The departing team went on to form Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), which raised over $25 million in seed funding from investors including Paradigm and a16z to continue building Zcash infrastructure, including what had been ECC's Zashi wallet — rebranded to Zodl. For the full story, see CoinDesk's coverage of the split.

September 2026 — NU7 vote

Zcash holders voted to approve NU7, a network upgrade cutting block times to roughly 25 seconds while adjusting the per-block subsidy and halving interval so total issuance over time stays the same. Read more in our glossary entry on halving and the network stats on our homepage for the next projected halving date.

Where things stand

Zcash today is developed across multiple independent organizations — the Zcash Foundation, ZODL, and others in the ecosystem — rather than a single company, a structural shift that followed the 2026 split. For what any of this means in practice, see our explainer on who actually runs Zcash. For the technical side of every upgrade mentioned above — activation dates, block heights, and what each one actually changed — see Zcash Network Upgrades: A Complete Timeline.

This page is updated as major events happen. If you spot something outdated, let us know in the @ZecZcash Telegram channel.