What is Zcash?
Zcash is a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency providing anonymous value transfer using zero-knowledge cryptography. The protocol provides the option for transactions to be private, in which case they will be completely anonymous. And also 'transparent', in which case they will be visible on the Zcash blockchain.
Contrary to the common misunderstanding, the majority of cryptocurrencies on the market, including Bitcoin (BTC), are not anonymous, but rather pseudonymous; At the same time, they do not explicitly reveal the identities of their users; each user has their public address, which can be traced back to them via the methods of data science and blockchain forensics.
Zcash was first released on October 28, 2016, originally based on Bitcoin’s codebase