Zcash is a cryptocurrency and blockchain that offers strong privacy.

Zcash was launched by the Electric Coin Company (formally, the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, LLC) in October, 2016. Zcash is a fork of Bitcoin and runs on the Zerocash protocol, which was first described in a white paper published in 2014 and subsequently developed over the course of several years by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn and various professors and academic researchers from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, the Technion, and Tel Aviv University. Initial research on the Zerocash protocol was funded in part by DARPA, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Office of Naval Research.