The Zcash Foundation has said that it has nothing to do with ZRC-20 or the $CASH token that is being promoted as the first tokens on the privacy chain.
The rebuttal came as a reply to a BSCN post on X. The Foundation wrote, “We have no prior knowledge of ‘ZRC-20’ or the $CASH token,” adding that it is “a private project, not an official Zcash token standard or protocol feature.”
The Foundation warned the public to research before touching it.
BSCN had posted a piece with the headline “Zcash Has Tokens Now” on September 20. Although it put a disclaimer at the end that it was a sponsored press release and that it does not endorse the message, nor is it responsible or liable for the accuracy of the content.
The post on X also carried the paid partnership tag; however, Zcash Foundation’s comment was timely, as the tag may have been missed by the non-discerning, and the post did not specify the team behind it, which leaves the floor open for speculation.
What ZRC-20 claims to be
ZRC-20 borrows heavily from Bitcoin’s BRC-20 inscriptions. It is being positioned as the fungible token standard for Zcash, and it is not a smart contract.
There is no consensus change, no ZIP, and Zcash nodes neither validate nor reject any of it, according to its draft documentation.
It said that its balances are gotten from off-chain programs called indexers. These indexers replay the memos in block order and compute who owns what. The draft is still labeled as a work in progress, and it has open questions that have not been resolved.
The promoters also point out that ZRC-20 is “not automatically private.”
$CASH and the mint that follows Bitcoin’s number
$CASH is the first token named for the ZRC-20 standard, and it has a supply cap of 21 million tokens, which mirrors that of Bitcoin.
Exchange Bitrue warned readers to verify the official mint interface, ticker, and launch status before using any site claiming to distribute CASH. It stated that fake mint pages and copycat tokens “can appear quickly” around new launches.
Why the timing is awkward for Zcash
ZEC has been on what is arguably its best run yet, shattering and setting new records since August. It is currently trading around $1480. It crossed $1500 on September 18 and sustained that for most of the following day before falling below the mark. It has risen by over 1.7% in the past 24 hours.
Miners are also eating well from the rally; mining ZEC paid about four times more per megawatt-hour than Bitcoin.
A major catalyst for the rally was Grayscale’s ZCSH ETF, which drew more than $500 million within two weeks of its August 25 listing.
The Zcash Foundation has good reasons to guard its name, and one of them is to avoid coming under the hammer of regulators like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The regulator closed a three-year probe into the nonprofit without action in January. Facing another probe is something it would be looking to avoid, especially as a token that it never sanctioned out there, trading on the Zcash name.