Coins that begin
as a memo nobody else can read.
Zcash has no contracts, so this is not a curve on a chain. It is one shielded address, a published viewing key, and a ledger anybody can rebuild from the blocks themselves. You write a memo; the chain orders it; the rules do the rest.
Base camp
One Zcash address, and its viewing key published for anyone to check. Every instruction this protocol has ever received arrived as an encrypted memo sent to it.
The memo
Five hundred and twelve bytes, encrypted to us, carried by a shielded payment. It says deploy this coin, or buy that one, or move mine to a key. Nobody but us can read it, and nobody at all can see who sent it.
The ledger
We replay those memos in block order and the balances fall out. Same chain, same rules, same answer — so we publish a state root at every height and you can check our arithmetic without trusting us.
The summit
On 5 November, Zcash gets native shielded assets. Every balance on this ledger converts one to one, and the coin stops being ours to account for and starts being the chain's.
On the mountain
all coinsSnowline holds the ZEC people send while a sale runs, and this ledger is the only record of who owns what until native assets arrive. Both of those are stated plainly on the rules page, because they are the parts that could cost you.