Zcash Foundation: 2025 Year in Review
As we look back on 2025, Zcash Foundation (ZF) celebrates a year of progress, collaboration, and strategic growth that strengthened the Zcash ecosystem and advanced financial privacy for the public good. Across technical development, governance, and community initiatives, our shared work this year reflected the Foundation’s enduring belief that privacy is essential infrastructure for human […]
Oblivious Message Retrieval
The Zcash Foundation has been looking into Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR) to determine whether it offers a potential solution to the recent performance problems that have affected Zcash wallet users, and whether there are any advantages to be gained from implementing this in a Zcash context.
FROST Performance
In this post, we briefly describe the threshold signature scheme FROST, and present benchmark results for our FROST implementation. We also describe one optimization that greatly improves its speed, especially for scenarios with a large number of signers.
Announcing a New Version of FROST
We are pleased to announce an updated version of FROST, a Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold signature scheme. FROST is designed to reduce the interaction between participants who jointly own a private signing key and wish to use this private key to sign a message (in the case of Zcash, FROST will be used to sign transactions […]
Bringing Privacy to Cosmos with Zcash
Protocols like Cosmos, Polkadot, and Ethereum 2.0 that aim to add interoperability across different blockchains are rapidly gaining steam. The Zcash Foundation knows there’s a path to bring the privacy gains of Zcash to these projects — benefiting all of their users, strengthening the already-strong Zcash anonymity set, and re-defining Zcash’s role in this ever-evolving […]
Assessing Mixnet Production-Readiness
All too often, the law of the hammer holds true: if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. This law holds for non-physical tools as well. Any technologist is at risk of succumbing to the everything-is-a-nail mentality; it is all too easy to overprescribe technical solutions without understanding the nuances […]
Private Contact Tracing Protocols Compared: DP-3T and CEN
Two weeks ago, we published a call-to-action urging the cryptography and privacy community to come together to work on the problem of privacy-preserving contact tracing. As noted in that post, it’s critically important to prevent the creation of new surveillance infrastructure that gives more power to the very institutions whose failures contributed to the crisis. But contact […]
Design Tradeoffs in Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing
In our previous post, we talked about how the problem of building decentralized, privacy-preserving contact tracing systems is an opportunity to meaningfully apply cryptography to a pressing public health problem. That post described one effort, TraceTogether, but there are several other efforts in development. In this post, we’ll describe a cryptographic perspective on the contact tracing problem, […]
Let’s Develop Decentralized, Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing
Over the last few months and especially the last few weeks, the spread of COVID-19 has created a massive health crisis at global scale. Healthcare infrastructure is being overwhelmed around the world. While data about the spread of the virus and its effects are still uncertain, projections about the potential effects of unchecked spread are […]
Zcash Foundation Donation to Open Privacy
We have a happy announcement to share! The Zcash Foundation donated 1,044.41369 ZEC (equivalent to $40,000 USD at the time of donation) to Canadian nonprofit Open Privacy. Much like the Foundation, Open Privacy works on permissionless privacy tools for everyone and anyone. ZF’s mission states, “We support the transition of Zcash into a large and healthy […]