Zcash is Officially 10 Years Old—Here’s Everything Notable From The Last Decade

Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency often compared with Bitcoin, is marking the 10th anniversary of its October 28, 2016 launch. A Grayscale research note says the network kept advancing through bear markets and periods when its price lagged other cryptocurrencies, helped by a built-in funding model in which miners receive 80 percent of newly issued ZEC and 20 percent goes to a Dev Fund for protocol and ecosystem work. Grayscale cited successive privacy-pool upgrades: Sprout, Sapling in 2018, Orchard in 2022, and Ironwood in 2026, which addressed a code vulnerability and added quantum-recoverable addresses and formal code verification. Grayscale expects continued work on transaction capacity, post-quantum readiness and AI-driven cybersecurity threats, requiring funding from multiple sources.