<aside> 💡 The Zcash Mission

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Key Terms & Definitions related to Zcash

A

Actions: Instead of creating several individual proofs for each Spend and Output, Orchard protocol merges them into a single ‘Actions’.
Addresses: Zcash has Shielded (Z/zaddr) & Transparent (T/taddr) addresses. Unified addresses (UA) are phasing in to replace Z & T following the NU5 upgrade.
Arborist Call: A Bi-Monthly call around Protocol & Research development updates. Register here: 15:00 UTC / 22:30 UTC/ Notes
Auto-shielding: Enables users (more specifically their wallets) to automatically move funds from a transparent address to the latest shielded ZEC pool.

B

Benchmarking: Miners are able to submit metrics on the efficiency of various hardware used to mine Zcash. Available to view here
Block: A Block is a record in the Zcash blockchain that contains a set of transactions sent on the network. Roughly every 75 seconds, on average, a new block is appended to the blockchain.
Block Explorer: An online tool to view all transactions, past and current, on the blockchain. They provide useful information such as network hashrate and transaction growth. Zcash Block Explorer
Blogs: ECC Blog / Zcash Foundation Blog / Zcash Community Blog
Blossom: The 3rd Major Network Upgrade for Zcash. More Info

C

Canopy: The 5th Major Network Upgrade for Zcash. More Info
Commitment Scheme: Allows a committer to commit to a polynomial with a short string that can be used by a verifier to confirm claimed evaluations of the committed polynomial. Useful for reducing communication costs in the Zcash protocol.
Community: The Official Zcash Community Forum / Zcash Community Discord / Zcash R&D Discord / Reddit / Telegram
Cypherpunk Zero: A Creative Universe & collaborative effort between ECC, illustrator Stranger Wolf, Mighty Jaxx and select ecosystem partners. Consisting of a forthcoming series of webcomics, NFTs and physical collectibles, the project explores the relationship between privacy, self-sovereignty and creative freedom. Cypherpunk Zero Site / Opensea Collection

D

DeFi: Projects integrating ZEC with DeFi: RenBridge / ZeroDAO
Deshielding: Refers to a transaction being sent from a zaddr(shielded address) to a taddr(transparent address). The origin of the transaction is not visible however the funds enter a publicly visible value pool. Transaction Anatomy
Developer Resources: Developer Resources
Documentation: Official Docs

E

ECC: The Electric Coin Company, the team behind the Zcash protocol, previously known as the Zcash Company.
ECDSA: Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm is a cryptographically secure digital signature scheme. The ECDSA sign/verify algorithm relies on elliptic curve point multiplication.
Education: Learning oriented videos explaining Zcash here
Encrypted Memos: An additional field for transactions sent to shielded addresses that is visible to the recipient of a payment. The encrypted memo is visible only the to the sender and recipient, unless the viewing key or payment disclosure gets shared with a third party.
Equihash: The memory-oriented proof-of-work mining algorithm that is used on Zcash.
Events: The Calendar of Zcash related Events here
Exchanges: List of Exchanges supporting Zcash

F

Fiat-Shamir: A technique for taking an interactive proof of knowledge and creating a digital signature based on it. This way, some fact (eg, knowledge of a secret) can be publicly proven without revealing underlying information.
Founders Reward: The Founder reward represents 20% of the total block reward and it’s deducted from every block’s value and transparently distributed to drive protocol development & growth.
Free2z: A tool for anonymous content and private donations powered by Zcash Free2z
FROST: 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 from joint owners of a signing key). Research Paper

G