Zcash is an implementation of the "Zerocash" protocol. Initially based on Bitcoin's design, Zcash intends to offer a far higher standard of privacy through a sophisticated zero-knowledge proving scheme that preserves confidentiality of transaction metadata. More technical details are available in our Protocol Specification.

This repository hosts the zcashd software, a Zcash consensus node implementation. It downloads and stores the entire history of Zcash transactions. Depending on the speed of your computer and network connection, the synchronization process could take several days.

The zcashd code is derived from a source fork of Bitcoin Core. The code was forked initially from Bitcoin Core v0.11.2, and the two codebases have diverged substantially.

See important security warnings on the Security Information page.

Zcash is experimental and a work in progress. Use it at your own risk.

This release is considered deprecated 16 weeks after the release day. There is an automatic deprecation shutdown feature which will halt the node some time after this 16-week period. The automatic feature is based on block height.

The Zebra project offers a different Zcash consensus node implementation, written largely from the ground up.

Please see our user guide for instructions on joining the main Zcash network.

• 📘 See the documentation at the ReadTheDocs for help and more information.
• 📨 Ask for help on the Zcash forum.
• 💬 Join our community on Discord

Participation in the Zcash project is subject to a Code of Conduct.

Build Zcash along with most dependencies from source by running the following command:

./zcutil/build.sh -j$(nproc)

Currently, Zcash is only officially supported on Debian and Ubuntu. See the Debian / Ubuntu build for detailed instructions.

For license information see the file COPYING.