ZCash

The Bitcoin community prides itself on transparent transactions while maintaining anonymity. However, anyone interested or who has a stake in a transaction could trace the parties within it.

ZCash doesn’t eliminate transaction information. Instead, it encrypts it so that it cannot be tracked. The ZCash blockchain is still encrypted, but the security protocol zk-SNARK adds additional user security and anonymity.

Bitcoin uses the hashing algorithm SHA-256. ZCash uses Equihash, which is incompatible with hardware and software designed for Bitcoin mining. It also has larger blocks and increased hashing times, which increases the network's hash rate. A cryptocurrency’s hash rate is the processing power of the network of miners—it's a measure of how fast the transactions can be verified and validated to open a new bloZCash is forked from the original Bitcoin codebase. In 2014, Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza believed there were security flaws in the way transactions were tracked through Bitcoin's blockchain. In their whitepaper outlining their ideas, they called their cryptocurrency Zerocash.ck.1