What was claimed, and what the chain shows

what the record shows~74% of supply sits in transparent addresses as of 22 Aug 2026; shielded share was 3.6% when Kappos measured it in 2018, 7.4% five years ago, and is ~26-27% today (26.8% per ZECStats/CipherScan, block 3,456,227). Peak shielded transaction share was 59.3% (Feb 2026), a record set nine years into the chain's life, and everything else sits on a public ledger.

what the record showsTwo independent unlimited-counterfeiting windows span roughly six of the chain's ~9.8 years — Sprout/BCTV14 (CVE-2019-7167, 28 Oct 2016 to 28 Oct 2018) and Orchard/halo2 (CVE-2026-54496, CVSS 9.3, 31 May 2022 to 1-2 Jun 2026) — and neither can be retroactively proven clean. zcashd also skipped Sprout proof verification entirely for 5.7 years (Jul 2020 to Mar 2026), and a duplicate-block-header bug let the turnstile accounting itself be silently disabled from zcashd v5.0.0 until the Apr 2026 fix.

what the record showsTrue for Orchard and Ironwood, which use recursive proof composition with no toxic waste. But Sprout still holds roughly 22,000-25,400 ZEC protected by the 2016 six-person Ceremony, and Sapling (~529,000 ZEC) still rests on the 2018 Powers of Tau (~90 participants); the Sprout turnstile audit — the only mechanism that could ever retire the 2016-2018 counterfeiting question — cannot conclude until that pool empties, and it has not in about eight years.

what the record shows20% of every block went to a for-profit company and 44-46 named stakeholders for four years (the Founders' Reward); then two organizations' addresses were written directly into consensus rules; then a one-time 78,750 ZEC disbursement went to a 2-of-3 P2SH multisig held by exactly three named entities (ZF, ECC, Shielded Labs) at t3ev37Q2uL1sfTsiJQJiWJoFzQpDhmnUwYo; and the Zcash trademark is governed by a two-party veto where, in ECC's own words, "no party has independent authority to declare that a specific chain of Zcash can actually be called Zcash."

what the record showsOnly one exchange, Gemini, supports shielded withdrawals, by ECC's own November 2025 account. Zcash designed transparency-preserving address types (TEX / "Traceable Unified Addresses") specifically to satisfy Binance and avoid delisting, and ZEC has been delisted or restricted by Coincheck (2018), OKEx Korea and Upbit (2019), Coinbase UK (2019), and OKX (2024); exchange-held ZEC sits in transparent t-addresses and contributes nothing to shielded supply.

what the record showsThe 2018 audits (NCC Group, Coinspect, Least Authority, Kudelski, Mary Maller) ran while four ECC insiders were sitting on an active counterfeiting bug and said nothing. The 2022 Orchard/halo2 audits (NCC Group, QEDIT, Mary Maller) missed a one-line circuit under-constraint that survived four years and was found by an LLM (Claude Opus 4.8, engaged by Shielded Labs) in a day.

what the record showsIn 2019, the counterfeiting bug was kept quiet for 341 days, told to only four people, with the Zcash Foundation informed one day before the public, the fix shipped disguised as a performance upgrade, and the MPC transcript quietly pulled offline. In 2026 the same class of bug was handled in about six days — a real improvement — but no security advisory was ever filed in zcash/orchard or zcash/halo2, the repositories that actually contain the defect.

what the record showsOn 7-8 Jan 2026 the entire ECC engineering and product team resigned; CEO Josh Swihart called it being "constructively discharged" by the Bootstrap board and described "malicious governance." The team immediately raised $25M from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk, Chapter One and Balaji Srinivasan — the same capital pool accumulating the coin — and the community's own governance ZIP (ecc-zbloc) is marked Obsolete.

what the record showsSupply verifiability for the Orchard-descended supply was created on 28 Jul 2026 by forcing everyone through the new Ironwood pool — it is prospective only. As of 22 Aug 2026, roughly 708,841 ZEC remain stranded in the still-unverifiable, exit-only Orchard pool, and the Ironwood pool itself is only 95.8% turnstile-verified, not 100%.

what the record showsThe line was posted on the same day ZEC fell more than 50%, on the disclosure of a bug that had made "provable correctness" false and unprovable for four years.

what the record showsGrayscale's Zcash trust/ETF (OTC ticker ZCSH) custodies its ZEC transparently at Coinbase Custody; shareholders get price exposure to ZEC, not privacy, and pay a 2.5% sponsor fee for it.

what the record showszcashd was killed by an automatic shutdown at block 3,417,100 on 18 Jul 2026, ten days before NU6.3. Zcash now runs on one consensus implementation, Zebra, after 41 advisories in five months (12 Critical), including two cases where a Critical consensus fix had to be re-fixed because the first attempt was wrong; the zcashd/Zebra divergence checking that had caught two 2026 bugs no longer exists.

what the record showsAs of Dec 2025 Zooko Wilcox was simultaneously Chief Product Officer of Shielded Labs (the org that funded the audit that found the 2026 bug) and a paid strategic advisor to Cypherpunk Technologies (the largest corporate ZEC holder, roughly 1.75-1.92% of supply); he co-authored the June 2026 vulnerability disclosure and drew 2,033 ZEC/month from the Founders' Reward, 0.9% of total supply - about $3.65M/yr at 2018 prices, which Forbes put at about $5M/yr across 2016 to 2020.

what the record showsNaval Ravikant was both a 2015 co-investor in the Zcash Company ($715,000 alongside Silbert and Roger Ver) and a founding board member of the Zcash Foundation, while publicly calling ZEC "insurance against Bitcoin" in Oct 2025. Barry Silbert was also a 2015 seed investor, is Grayscale's chairman (Grayscale sponsors the Zcash trust/ETF), filed a Rule 144 notice on 6 Nov 2025 to sell 1,000 Trust shares for $47,250.00 near the price peak while his family office, Silbert Family Investments LLC, filed on 5 Nov for 9,753 shares at $407,312.59 (both are ZCSH trust shares on OTCQX, not ZEC), and separately predicted ZEC could 500x in Feb 2026.

what the record showsGemini claimed this in Sep 2020, and ECC claimed it again on Gemini's behalf in Nov 2025. Both cannot be a first.

what the record showsKappos et al. (USENIX 2018) showed the Founders' Reward was a deterministic on-chain fingerprint: every founder withdrawal was exactly 250.0001 ZEC, and 1,943 of 1,953 withdrawals (99.5%) also matched a 6-10-block timing pattern.