An outstanding thing about Zcash is its ability to use cryptography to provide improved privacy for all its users. Zcash as its name implies, started its journey in the year 2013 as a project called Zerocoin, some group of people from the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore USA, came together to work on this project aimed at producing a digital currency and peer to peer digital payment network. The group studied Bitcoin and its weakness and decided to build secured pseudonyms in other to allow anonymous transactions. This is to prevent Bitcoin detailed transactions that can be viewed publicly and privately. They designed their system to use cryptographic assumptions, it changes the Bitcoin security model and it removes the third party scenario. Over and over they witnessed their coin integration into the digital currency in Bitcoin, its performance during computation and its impact on Bitcoin protocol.
This team was led by Matthew Green, Christina Garman, Ian Miers, and Aviel D. Rubin. As time pass by, the Zerocoin protocol was greatly improved and in that process the need for it to be properly identified with what it performs a raised. Its proper identification issues brought about its name as to change from Zerocoin to Zerocash system.
In 2016, the need for it to be involved in cryptocurrency world made it have a new name called the Zcash. This development was led by the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, colloquially referred to as Zcash Company and its founder and CEO as Wilcox-O'Hearn and its founding team.
On the 28th day of October 2016; Zcash payments were published on the public blockchain, and users were left with the option of either using an optional privacy feature to hide the recipient, sender, and amount being transacted. Zcash has a fixed total supply of 21 million units in the first 4 years, and that was 20% of the coins created within that period. It was allocated to a "founders' reward" shared between a non-profit foundation, investors and developers.
Wilcox had several meetings with the law enforcement agencies in the U.S. to inform them that the purpose of developing a secured Zcash platform is not in anyway to facilitate illegal activities because individual transactions are auditable on a higher level, but its disclosure is under the participant's control.
It is important to note that Zcash built their platform based on the U.S. government permit in 1992 when it gave commercial freedom for both the development and sales of cryptography. This permit also paved way for HTTP application layer for the inter net-walking popularly called the internet. Its initial purpose was to provide service for banks, emails and other password related issues.
This is what has come into play as part of the random questions asked when you want to open a bank account. It is also available here on the steemit platform; they are all forms of cryptographic keys. Of course, if you are a ''steemit'' user, you should have noticed it in your wallet.
Presently, Zcash has a market cap over two billion dollars, it has made gains of $18.61% within seven days and $4.44% within an hour. Its current price is $676.6 in the crypto market and it is still rising.
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