Swap Zcash (ZEC)

The numbers below were checked on 14 October 2026 against the Zcash Improvement Proposals on zips.z.cash and the block timestamps on blockchair.com.

A block every 75 seconds

Zcash was forked from the Bitcoin code and mined its first block on 28 October 2016 with Bitcoin's model of blocks and outputs. The original block target was 150 seconds. ZIP 208, activated with the Blossom upgrade at block 653,600 on 11 December 2019, halved it to 75 seconds and doubled the halving interval to 1,680,000 blocks so that the emission schedule in years stayed the same. The target is an average: like Bitcoin, Zcash adjusts difficulty to aim at it, and single gaps vary.

Confirmations the site waits for

The route data behind this site counts a ZEC deposit after 6 confirmations. Six blocks at 75 seconds is seven and a half minutes; with a minute of processing at the low end and slow blocks at the high end the estimate reads 9–19 minutes. That puts Zcash between Litecoin (5 confirmations, 14–29 minutes) and the near-instant networks, and well ahead of Bitcoin's 21–44.

Two kinds of ledger entry

Zcash has a transparent pool, where addresses and amounts are public exactly as on Bitcoin, and shielded pools — Sapling and, since NU5, Orchard — where a zero-knowledge proof lets the network validate a payment without the addresses or the amount being written to the chain. A single transaction can cross between them. From a sender's point of view: a deposit arrives at a transparent address shown by the form, so if you send from a shielded balance your wallet builds a deshielding transaction, and the amount becomes visible on the receiving side. The Zcash page above covers what that means for each address type you might be paid to.

Fees under ZIP 317

Zcash fees are not a bidding market. ZIP 317 sets a conventional fee of 5,000 zatoshi per "logical action" — roughly, per input or output the transaction touches — with a grace of two actions, so the smallest conventional fee is 10,000 zatoshi, 0.0001 ZEC. A zatoshi is a hundred-millionth of a ZEC, the same granularity as a satoshi. A wallet that follows the ZIP pays that fee and the transaction is relayed; there is nothing to tune and no reason for a deposit to sit unconfirmed for want of a higher fee. The old flat fee of 1,000 zatoshi (ZIP 313) is history, and a wallet still using it may find its transactions rejected.

Supply and halvings

The cap is 21 million ZEC. The first halving came with Canopy at block 1,046,400 on 18 November 2020; the second with NU6 at block 2,726,400 on 23 November 2024, taking the block subsidy to 1.5625 ZEC. The next is at block 4,406,400, roughly four years on at the 75-second pace. A halving changes what miners earn and nothing about how a transfer is made or confirmed.

A Zcash deposit is predictable. Fixed fee, steady blocks, six confirmations in a quarter of an hour. If the status page has not moved after twenty minutes, the usual cause is a transaction that was never broadcast — check the hash on the explorer first.

Zcash has five address prefixes in use, and the first character tells you which pool the address belongs to. They were checked against ZIP 316 on zips.z.cash on 14 October 2026; the long version, with what a swap pays to each, is Zcash address types: what a swap pays to.

t1… and t3… are Base58Check addresses that begin with two fixed characters rather than Bitcoin's one. They behave exactly like Bitcoin addresses: anyone can read the balance and the history. zs… and zc… are shielded addresses of two generations; Sprout is the original 2016 pool, Sapling came later, and since Canopy (ZIP 211) no new value can enter Sprout. u1… is a unified address: a Bech32m string whose human-readable part is u, carrying one or more receivers — Orchard, Sapling, and optionally one transparent receiver (P2PKH or P2SH, never both). ZIP 316 requires a revision-0 unified address to contain at least one shielded receiver; revision 2 of the ZIP defines two further prefixes, zu (shielded-only) and tu (may include transparent); the form accepts u1….

What the form accepts

For a ZEC payout the form takes a t1… address or a u1… address. A t1… payout is transparent and lands exactly where a Bitcoin payment would. A u1… payout goes to one of the receivers inside the address; the payout side picks which, and the transaction hash on the status page shows whether the coins landed transparently or shielded. t3…, zs… and zc… are refused. Every current wallet that shows a zs… address can also show a t1… or u1… address; use that one.

Which address to give

1. Your own wallet: a u1… address if the wallet offers one, otherwise its t1… address. If the coins must end up shielded and the payout lands transparently, shield them yourself afterwards — a normal transaction at the normal fee.
2. An exchange: the ZEC deposit address from its deposit page. Exchanges give t1… addresses; the payout is public on the chain like any other transparent payment.
3. Another person: ask for a t1… or u1… address and read the first few and last few characters back. Zcash addresses carry a checksum, so a mistyped character is caught, but a different valid address is not.

The deposit side

The deposit address the form shows is a t1… address. If you send from an exchange, it sends transparently and nothing changes. If you send from a shielded balance, the wallet constructs a deshielding transaction; it is a normal Zcash transaction that takes a moment longer to build and reveals the amount at the deposit address. The deposit is counted the same way either way: six confirmations of the block it lands in.

Every Zcash transaction has a 64-character hash, and the transparent parts of it are public. The status page links the Zcash side of a swap to Blockchair, which opens the hash with the block it is in, the number of confirmations, the time, the transparent inputs and outputs with their amounts, the fee, and — for transactions that touch a shielded pool — the shielded spends and outputs as counts, since their contents are not on the chain. mainnet.zcashexplorer.app shows the same transaction.

What is visible and what is not

A payout to a t1… address is the first case. A payout to a u1… address that resolves to an Orchard or Sapling receiver is the third — the explorer shows the amount leaving the payout side and nothing about where it went, which is the point of a shielded receiver.

A deposit you sent

1. Copy the hash from your wallet's transaction list — the hash, not the address.
2. Open it on Blockchair. Not found means the wallet has not broadcast it; wallets that were offline, or that sync the chain slowly, are the usual cause.
3. Check the output: the t1… deposit address from the form, with the exact amount.
4. Count the confirmations. The status page updates on its own at each block up to six.

A payout you received

1. Open the payout hash from the status page.
2. For a t1… payout, find your address among the outputs. The amount next to it is "You get" from the form, with the payout network fee already taken out.
3. For a u1… payout that landed shielded, the explorer shows an output into the shielded pool but not your address. Your wallet, which holds the viewing key, is the only thing that can show the coins; give it a minute to scan the new block.
4. Keep the hash. It is the evidence the payout happened and what support on either side will ask for.

What a block explorer shows about a swap does this walk for other networks; Reading a swap status page explains each stage of the status page itself.

Zcash's mistakes are mostly mistakes of address type. The chain is forgiving about fees and timing; it is strict about what a given address can receive.

The receiver that is not what you expected

A unified address bundles receivers, and the sender's software — here, the payout side — picks the most private one it supports. That can be Orchard, Sapling or the transparent receiver, and the address does not let you force the choice. A payout that lands on the transparent receiver is still yours and still private from that moment on if you shield it; the only cost is one more transaction at the ZIP 317 fee. Zcash address types: what a swap pays to goes receiver by receiver.

Shielded balances and the deposit

The deposit address is transparent. A wallet with only a shielded balance has to build a deshielding transaction to pay it, and most do that without comment. The two things that go wrong: a wallet whose shielded balance is still in the Sprout pool, which newer wallets cannot spend from without a migration first; and a wallet that has not finished syncing, which cannot build a valid proof against the current chain. Both show up as a Send that never produces a hash. Let the wallet sync, or migrate the Sprout funds, and try again.

Less arrives than the form expects

Exchanges take their withdrawal fee out of the amount you type. The swap runs on what arrived; if the shortfall takes the deposit under the route minimum it cannot be processed as a swap at all. The minimum is shown under the amount field, and Minimums, maximums and network fees on small swaps explains how it is set.

A confirmed Zcash transaction is final. The six confirmations the site waits for are the point of no return on the deposit side, and a payout to the wrong address — valid, but not yours — can only be returned by whoever holds it.

Zcash upgrades on a schedule, by network upgrade with a fixed activation height, and each one has a deployment ZIP on zips.z.cash. The ones that changed something a sender can see are below; heights come from the ZIPs and the timestamps from blockchair.com, both read on 14 October 2026.

Blossom, December 2019. The one upgrade that changed the clock. Blocks come twice as often, so six confirmations take half the wall-clock time they took in 2018 — the reason a ZEC deposit here is faster than a Litecoin one despite needing one more block.

Canopy and the first halving, November 2020. Canopy closed the Sprout pool to new deposits; coins already there can still be spent out. It also carried the first halving.

NU5, May 2022. The upgrade that produced the addresses on this page. Orchard is a new shielded pool, and unified addresses are the way a wallet gives out one string that works for every sender. Wallets rolled unified addresses out over the following year or two, which is why older exchange pages show only t1… and some wallets still default to zs….

NU6 and the second halving, November 2024. The subsidy halved to 1.5625 ZEC per block. The rest of NU6 reorganised how a share of the block reward is set aside; nothing about transfers changed.

ZIP 317 fees. Not a network upgrade but a convention for wallets and nodes: 5,000 zatoshi per logical action, two actions' grace. The old 1,000-zatoshi flat fee of ZIP 313 is no longer what nodes expect.

What is next. NU7's deployment ZIP (259) existed on 14 October 2026 without a mainnet activation height, and the earlier ZIP 254 was withdrawn; nothing in it changes addresses or confirmations for a sender.

What has not changed. The 21-million cap, the t1… address, and the two-pool design: a transparent ledger readable like Bitcoin's next to a shielded one that is not. A t1… address from 2017 still receives coins today.

Zcash and Monero are the two coins on this site whose ledgers can hide a payment, and people who hold one usually consider the other. For a transfer the difference is not how much is hidden but whether hiding is optional. The table uses the confirmation counts and times the site is built from and what was checked on zips.z.cash on 14 October 2026; the Monero side is described on the Monero page.

Privacy by choice versus by default. On Zcash the address decides: a t1… payout is as public as a Bitcoin payment, a shielded receiver is not, and a holder can move between the two. On Monero there is no public option; a payout is private whether or not the receiver wanted it to be, and an exchange that credits it does so from its own records rather than from the chain. Which is better is a question about what you need, not about the coins.

What a swap can see. Both deposits arrive at an address the swap shows you. A ZEC deposit lands transparently, so the amount is public at that address; an XMR deposit is only visible to the two parties. On the payout side, ZEC to a u1… address may land shielded; XMR always does.

Time. Zcash's six confirmations at 75 seconds finish before Monero's five at two minutes. The gap is a few minutes either way.

Addresses. Monero's are long and come in two formats, both accepted; integrated addresses and payment IDs are history, as Monero subaddresses, integrated addresses and payment IDs explains. Zcash's are shorter and come in five, three of which the form refuses — the addresses section above is the thing to read before a ZEC payout.

Routes. The two coins meet at Bitcoin: BTC → XMR has a step-by-step post, and BTC → ZEC is the same shape with a 75-second chain at the end instead of a two-minute one.