Our Work
Building for a private future
Zcash Foundation is at the forefront of cryptographic research and tooling, advancing the privacy capabilities of Zcash and the broader decentralized ecosystem.
A key focus is zk-SNARKs, a zero-knowledge proof mechanism that allows transaction validation without revealing sensitive details such as sender, recipient, or amounts, setting new standards for confidentiality in blockchain technology.
Our Projects
Zebra
Our team developed Zebra, an independent Zcash node written in Rust, which strengthens network resilience by validating transactions and maintaining blockchain state in a modular and decentralized manner.
FROST for Zcash
Our engineers and researchers introduced FROST for Zcash, a Rust-based implementation of threshold Schnorr signatures that enables multisig-style transactions while preserving privacy through unlinkable and re-randomized signatures. These cryptographic advancements ensure robust security and privacy while fostering developer engagement through accessible libraries, tutorials, and tools.
Shielded Aid Initiative
The Shielded Aid Initiative (SAI) applies privacy-preserving technology to protect vulnerable communities in humanitarian aid delivery.
Zebra
We use decentralized computing and cutting-edge cryptography in the production of Zebra, our independent, consensus-compatible, modern, modular implementation of a Zcash node.
The Node
zcashd is the original Zcash node, developed by the Electric Coin Company as a fork of the original Bitcoin node. Zebra is an independent Zcash node implementation, developed from scratch, using memory-safe Rust language. Since zcashd and zebrad implement the same protocol, they are able to communicate with each other.
The Story
Zebra, the first Zcash node to be written entirely in Rust, can be used to join the Zcash peer-to-peer network. This helps to strengthen the resilience of the network by validating and broadcasting transactions, and maintaining the Zcash blockchain state in a more distributed manner.
The Solution
Alternative node implementations help developers quickly detect implementation-specific bugs that could cause consensus-related issues. Multiple node implementations also attract a broader audience of developers to Zcash. Our implementation of zcashd allows Rust developers to easily start developing on and contributing to Zcash.
With Zebra, users and developers have a new avenue to engage with the Zcash ecosystem. Read the documentation in the Zebra repo as it continues to update and new features are added by the Zcash Foundation.
What Makes Zebra Stand Out
Better Performance
Since it was implemented from scratch in an async, parallelized way, Zebra is currently faster than zcashd.
Better Governance
With a new node deployment, there will be more developers who can implement different features for the Zcash network.
Runtime Safety
With an independent implementation, the detection of consensus bugs can happen quicker, reducing the risk of consensus splits.
Spec Safety
With several node implementations, it is much easier to notice bugs and ambiguity in protocol specification.
Better Security
Since it is developed in a memory-safe language (Rust), it is less likely to be affected by memory-safety security bugs that could compromise the environment where it is run.
FROST for Zcash
Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold (FROST) is a threshold signature scheme that essentially reduces network overhead during signing operations – while employing novel techniques to protect against forgery attacks applicable to similar schemes.
The Operation
FROST improves upon the state of the art in Schnorr threshold signature protocols, as it can be safely used without limiting concurrency of signing operations – yet allows for true threshold signing, as only a threshold number of participants are required for signing operations. It can be used as either a two-round protocol where signers send and receive two messages in total, or optimized to a single-round signing protocol with a pre-processing stage.
The Secret
It achieves its efficiency improvements in part by allowing the protocol to abort in the presence of a misbehaving participant (who is then identified and excluded from future operations)—a reasonable model for practical deployment scenarios.
Signatures produced by FROST for Zcash are privacy-preserving; they do not leak metadata about the set of signers or number of signers.
What Sets It Apart
Metadata-free
Signatures produced by FROST do not leak any metadata, such as what the threshold number of signatures is, or how many or which of the keys participated in generating a signature.
RedDSA Compatible
Makes it easier to integrate into Zcash systems and applications that already exist, without requiring significant modifications to the existing infrastructure.
Unlinkability
Keeps the same security guarantees of RedDSA, which prevents attackers from linking two FROST-generated signatures to the same person.
Easy Developer Experience
ZF libraries allow anyone to easily integrate ZF FROST into their project. ZF also creates demo applications and tutorials to make it even easier for developers to use FROST.
Secure
Is compatible with unlikable re-randomized signatures, as required by the Zcash protocol.
Shielded Multising
Currently the only way to do multisig style signatures for shielded transactions in Zcash.
