ShapeShift Incorporates Zcash, World’s First Selectively Private Asset

ShapeShift adds dozens of digital assets each year. We are incredibly excited to now offer Zcash (ZEC) on the exchange! Zcash is a consumer privacy-focused digital asset developed by the science-focused Zcash team lead by Co-Founder Zooko Wilcox. Users can now exchange ZEC with dozens of blockchain assets including bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Dash, Dogecoin and more.

So what's the deal with Zcash? The Zcash (ZEC) asset offers consumer privacy and, for the first time, selective transparency of transactions. Zcash’s groundbreaking cryptography has the ability to hide the sender, recipient, and value of all transactions on the blockchain, offering total payment confidentiality. The Zcash protocol makes blockchains useful for a whole range of applications that the cleartext, fully transparent blockchains cannot be used for; including fintech, healthcare and retail. Wilcox explains:

"Zcash is a new technology that 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. Zcash makes blockchains useful for a whole range of applications that the cleartext, fully transparent blockchains cannot be used for; including fintech, healthcare, retail (buying/selling goods or services), etc. "

The technical breakthrough of ZEC is a type of zero-knowledge proof called a zk-SNARK. zk-SNARKs allow the blockchain network to maintain a secure ledger of balances without disclosing the parties or amounts involved in transactions. Instead of publicly listing spend-authority and transaction values, the transaction metadata is encrypted and zk-SNARKs are used to prove that users are spending value they actually possess.

So how do I get a Zcash wallet? A Linux-based daemon and command-line tool is available through the Zcash core development team for users wishing to purchase ZEC. Both community-hosted and pre-established wallets will be available. Click here for a full list of offerings!

Also, check out our partner wallet, Jaxx.io! They now support Zcash. LEARN MORE

You can also read more about Zcash in this interview CoinCap News did with Zooko Wilcox. Click here to read it!