Zcash promotes itself as a “permissionless cryptocurrency”. While some virtual currencies operate on blockchains that have a full history of the transactions that have taken place using it, this can potentially jeopardize privacy. To combat this, Zcash uses cryptography to enhance the privacy of all transactions to a greater degree than has perhaps been achieved before. It is still decentralized and still uses open source software to work. The shielded transactions make it different from all other virtual coins in use today.
