Zcash has no single "shielded percentage". Three numbers answer three different questions: how much ZEC sits in shielded pools, how many transactions touch a shielded pool, and how many are shielded-only. On our trackers the first was 29.21 % on October 13, 2026, the second 48.5 % on October 12, and the third 13.2 %. This guide explains what each one counts.
Snapshot, October 12 and 13, 2026
Figures come from our own trackers, Shielded Supply and Network Activity, which read the Zcash blockchain through an RPC provider. They change daily; the live pages are the reference. We did not verify any third-party shielded share and do not compare ours with theirs.
Number 1: shielded supply, how much ZEC sits in shielded pools
Shielded Supply reports a balance: how much ZEC is held in each value pool at a specific block, tracked daily. On October 13, 2026 (block 3,516,898) it showed 4,961,336.5480 ZEC in the shielded pools, 29.21 % of supply. The transparent pool held 11.95 million ZEC (70.38 %) and a protocol-reserved lockbox 69.47 thousand ZEC (0.41 %), which is never counted as shielded user funds. This number is about balances, not about how often people transact, and it says nothing about individual holders.
Number 2: shielded activity, how many transactions touch a shielded pool
Network Activity counts transactions per UTC day and sorts each one into exactly one of three groups:
| Group on October 12, 2026 | Transactions | Share of the day |
|---|---|---|
| Transparent only | 3,854 | 51.5 % |
| Mixed (transparent and shielded) | 2,638 | 35.3 % |
| Shielded only | 985 | 13.2 % |
| Total | 7,477 | 100 % |
Shielded activity is different from those three: it is every transaction that touched at least one shielded pool, so shielded-only plus mixed. On that day it was 3,623 transactions, 48.5 %. A mixed transaction, such as a shielding transaction, touches the transparent pool and a shielded pool at once, which is why it counts for both sides when you ask "did this touch a shielded pool?" but only once in the three-way split.
Number 3: shielded-only, the strictest count
Shielded-only transactions never touch the transparent pool. They were 13.2 % of the day's transactions on October 12. If your question is "how often does a transaction stay fully inside the shielded pools?", this is the figure that answers it, and it is the smallest of the three.
Why the three numbers differ, and why published shares differ too
- Balance versus count. A pool can hold a large balance and see little daily activity, or the reverse; neither page can be used to infer the other.
- Any versus only. "Touched a shielded pool" and "stayed inside shielded pools" are different questions with different answers.
- Coinbase transactions. Each block contains one coinbase transaction with a transparent input and no shielded part. In our data it is counted inside "transparent only". At about 1,150 blocks per day (the span between the end-of-day heights of October 11 and 12) that is roughly 15 % of a day with 7,477 transactions. We do not yet offer a coinbase-excluded view, so a "user-initiated" share would be different from ours. If block times change with a network upgrade, the number of blocks per day, and so the coinbase count, changes too.
- Period. One day, a month or a quarter can give very different shares when activity is uneven.
- Coverage. Our activity history starts on August 25, 2026, so it is a short window, not a long-term trend.
We did not verify any third-party figure. The points above are the likely reasons that two sources can both be correct and still quote different shares; check a source's definition before comparing numbers.
What these numbers do not tell you
None of them measures the value moved, the number of people using the pools, or what an observer could link. A larger shielded balance can make the shielded pool more useful as a crowd, which is the idea behind the anonymity set, but the numbers here do not measure that. For what a viewer can and cannot see on the chain, read shielded vs transparent transactions and the Zcash privacy hub.
How to use the trackers yourself
- Decide the question first: balance (Shielded Supply) or activity (Network Activity).
- Read the definition and methodology on the page before quoting a figure.
- Quote the date and the block height or UTC day, as we do above.
- For raw files and sources, see our open data page.
- To look at a single transaction, see how to check a transaction on an explorer; shielded amounts and addresses stay hidden there by design, as our shielded check guide explains.
Sources and method
Figures were read on October 13 and 14, 2026 from Shielded Supply and Network Activity, including the "What This Data Means" and methodology sections on the activity page (coinbase treatment, coverage from August 25, 2026, finalized UTC days). The blocks-per-day estimate comes from our own data-health report (heights 3,514,604 on October 11 and 3,515,758 on October 12). New articles first appear in the ZecZcash Telegram channel.