Why is everyone so excited about ZCash?

There has never been a crypto-currency with a launch like ZCash  has had.  It has been in existence for less than a week and it is already making headlines around the world (www.coindesk.com)

It took Bitcoin 4 years to reach a price of US$1216.73 (and it is currently trading well below that).  It took ZCash just a few hours to reach a price of US$2.3 million per coin.  Even now, less than a week after its launch, it is still trading at more than 1 BTC for 1 ZEC.

So what has caused all the hype?  Why are people so interested in this particular crypto-currency?  There are hundreds of others to choose from, why has ZCash risen head and shoulders above the rest?

For a start, the team behind ZCash is not your typical let's-fork-bitcoin-and-create-a-new-crypto-currency team.  Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, the founder of ZCash, is a cryptographer with decades of credible experience.  

He is part of the team that developed BLAKE2, a cryptographic hash function that aims to replace the widely used MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms.  He has worked over the years with many of the big names in the crypto-currency world and was working on virtual currencies before Satoshi's seminal whitepaper on Bitcoin.

Zooko has put together a team of dedicated cryptographers and computer scientists who have been working for several years on this currency.  They have had a clear strategy towards the final launch which happened on the 28th October 2016.

While all of that is impressive in itself, it is ZCash's ability to provide confidential transactions on a blockchain using Zero Knowledge Proofs that is the fundamental shift.  This allows the blockchain network to validate a transaction without needing to know all the details of the transaction.

One of the problems with Bitcoin is that every transaction is mapped to its previous transaction.  Every transaction contains provenance, or history.  Each bitcoin or piece of a bitcoin can be traced back to its origin.  If at any point in time, it can be shown that a piece of a bitcoin passed through the hands of a drug dealer, or a money launderer then that piece of a bitcoin becomes tarnished by its history.  

Certain counter-parties don't want the reputational risk of holding tarnished coins in their portfolio and are prepared to pay a premium for newly minted bitcoin with no history.  (Mint exchange).

ZCash provides a mechanism to hide the source of a transaction.  This means that every coin on the ZCash network is equal to every other coin.  No coin can be tarnished by its history.  In the words of the ZCash team - "All coins are created equal".  This is the first fully fungible crypto-currency. 

And that, more than anything else is the reason that ZCash will remain head and shoulders above all other crypto-currencies.