Zcash Hard Fork, Ycash, is Live

A new digital currency Ycash (YEC), which forked away from Zcash blockchain and one of the best known privacy coins, is now live.

Ycash was first announced in April by Zcash supporter and the founder of Ycash Foundation, Howard Loo. He says that the purpose of the fork is “to restore a goal—mining on commodity hardware—that appears to have been largely abandoned on the Zcash blockchain, and also to uphold a promise that “the Zcash Founders Reward would be forever capped at 2.1 million coins.”

Ycash’s post explains that the software used for Ycash is based on the one for Zcash, which is based on the software for Bitcoin. It builds upon Zcach’s codebase and its blockchain, thus sharing its blockchain history too. This means that, as the Ycash/Zcash fork happened at block height 570,000 of the Zcash blockchain, those blocks remain the same on both blockchains. It also means that everybody who has Zcash private keys as of that block height can use them to get the same amount of Ycash.

Ycash believes that this way the entire Zcash community, including engineers and cryptographers at the Electric Coin Company – everybody who holds Zcash – have a vested interest in the success of Ycash.

The total supply of Ycash is capped at 21 million coins.

This new project also aims to solve the privacy problem Bitcoin has by building upon the Zcash codebase. When it comes to the distribution problem, they are “aggressively pursuing mining on commodity hardware by all available means, including periodic changes to Ycash’s mining algorithm”, distributing 90% of the coins through the free market mining process. Also, 5% of the coins starting at block height 570,000 is going to the Ycash Development Fund, which is managed by the nonprofit Ycash Foundation.

Zcash Foundation cleared up in a tweet, as Ycash also says on their site, that Ycash Foundation as an organization behind YEC, was independently created by Howard Loo and that the Ycash project is completely independent from the Electric Coin Company and the Zcash Foundation.

Along with the blockchain fork, ZecWallet will also be forked to support Ycash, and official builds for all supported platforms will be provided. Additionally, Ycash is now available on Guarda wallet too.

Also, on June 17, the foundation announced that their application to have Ycash listed on the Binance exchange was submitted and is now considered “in progress”.

“We will aggressively compete with both [Bitcoin and Zcash] (and all other digital currencies) for user and merchant adoption”, stands in the Ycash’s announcement.

At pixel time (08:36 UTC), zcash, which is ranked 24th by market capitalization, trades at c. USD 75 and is down by more than 1% in the past 24 hours and by almost 17% in the past week.