Zcash Has Tokens Now

Zcash has spent nine years being the most serious privacy chain in the world and one of the quietest. Shielded transactions, zero-knowledge proofs done properly, a research pedigree nobody disputes. And for nine years, exactly one thing you could hold on it: ZEC.

That changes soon. ZRC-20 is the first token standard about to go live on Zcash, and anyone will be able to use it — no upgrade, no ZIP, no waiting, no permission.

How it works

A ZRC-20 token is a JSON document written into the memo field of a shielded Zcash output. Three documents do everything.

deploy claims a ticker and fixes its supply forever:

{"p":"zrc-20","op":"deploy","tick":"cash","max":"21000000","lim":"1000"}

mint issues against it. transfer moves a balance. That is the whole protocol.

Balances live in indexers — programs that read every operation in block order and compute the ledger. Run the same code over the same blocks and you get the same answer as everyone else, every time. The rules are published, the reducer is a few dozen lines, and anyone can run one. Nobody has to trust us to know what they own.

The memo field was waiting for this

Every Sapling and Orchard output on Zcash already carries a 512-byte memo, whether you use it or not. It has been sitting there since 2018.

Two properties make it an excellent place to put a token.

It is always exactly 512 bytes. Short payloads are padded with zeros before encryption, so the length of what you wrote never leaks. A one-line mint and a full transfer look identical from outside.

And it is already a standard. Under ZIP-302, a memo starting with a printable character is a plain UTF-8 text memo. JSON opens with {. That means a ZRC-20 operation is an ordinary text memo, and any Zcash wallet that can send one can already write a token. No forks, no new clients, no custom tooling.

Private by construction

This is the part that only works on Zcash.

A shielded memo is encrypted. Only the recipient's incoming viewing key or the sender's outgoing viewing key will open it. Most chains give you a ledger and then ask you to bolt privacy on afterwards. Zcash gives you privacy and asks how much you want to give back.

ZRC-20's answer is precise. Operations go to a public protocol address whose incoming viewing key is published, so anyone can sync it and rebuild the full ledger. The operations are readable. The sender is not — and neither is any other output in the transaction that paid for it.

You can see that a transfer happened. You cannot see who funded it, what else moved alongside it, or what the rest of that wallet holds. That is a property no transparent chain can offer at any price, and it is the reason to build this here rather than anywhere else.

Ownership without a ledger entry

Shielded senders are unlinkable. That is the entire point of Zcash, and it means an indexer reading a memo has no way to know who wrote it.

So ZRC-20 carries proof inside the payload. Every account is an Ed25519 keypair. Every mint and transfer is signed over its own canonical form, and a per-account nonce makes replay impossible even though the memos are readable by design.

It costs bytes — a transfer runs about 280 of the 512 available — and it buys something real: authorization that does not depend on an address, a UTXO, or anyone's goodwill. Your key is your balance.

$CASH

The first ZRC-20 token will be $CASH, and the terms are as plain as we could make them:

• 21,000,000 maximum supply, fixed at deploy, unchangeable
• 90% — 18,900,000 — by fair launch mint, open to anyone, first come first served
• 10% — 2,100,000 — for airdrops

No presale. No team allocation. No investors. No unlock schedule, because there is nothing to unlock. Those two lines account for every token that will ever exist.

Start here

The full specification is at docs.zrc20.io — the operation formats, the validation rules, the exact ordering that makes replay deterministic, and a reference indexer you can run in an afternoon.

It is a draft and it is marked as one. The open questions are listed in the docs rather than buried, because a standard gets good by being argued with in public.

Read the spec. Run an indexer. Mint something.

Zcash has tokens now.