ZCash TEX addresses are a special type of receiving address that requires funds be sent from Transparent Addresses. TEX addresses make it impossible to send funds from a Shielded Address. In practice that means you will need to send funds from your Shielded Balance to one of your own Transparent Addresses and then from here to the receiver's TEX address. The technical proposal for TEX addresses is ZIP 320: Defining an Address Type to which funds can only be sent from Transparent Addresses.

Why were ZCash TEX addresses created?

Due to governments weaponizing money against protestors, citizens of countries they disagree with, etc they are increasingly interested in stripping people of the human right of privacy. As a result they are creating more regulator pressure on intermediaries like Binance. This has resulted in policies such as all funds deposited into Binance must come from a transparent address. This requirement meant Binance gave an ultimatum of either enforce this at the protocol level or we will delist ZCash and the result was that TEX addresses were born.

Do ZCash TEX addresses decrease privacy?

In our view, TEX addresses do not decrease privacy much for those people who take privacy seriously. Some people may reduce usage of shielded balances which would negatively effect their privacy. For those people that will only send to a TEX address from a transparent address that was funded from Shielded Balance, then privacy implication is minimal. We do see potentially increased ability of node operators to be able to make stronger correlations of users via metadata under this scheme. However, our ZCash Wallet will always be designed to reduce this type of tracking.

Now that ZCash has TEX addresses is it regulatory compliant?

Considering that TEX addresses do not significantly impact most people's privacy and the goal of government overreach is to strip away privacy, then our guess is that this change will only be the first of many demands. In the future governments will make additional requirements to strip away privacy. Ultimately, in our view, the future of ZCash exchanging will need to be decentralized and ZCash Wallet will support this.

ZCash Unified Addresses are a way to encode multiple address and parameters into a single address. This way the sender of the funds can decode the address and send funds to any of the provided pools. For example, currently Orchard, Sapling, and Transparent addresses are generally encoded into a Unified Address. Some services such as exchanges may not be allowed to send shielded transactions. As a result, they require a transparent address which requires the user to understand different address types such as transparent versus shielded sapling. If the wallet gives Unified Addresses, then the user only sees one address type and the exchange can choose to send to the Transparent receiver.

The wallet is then responsible for converting this to shielded balances. Not all wallets enforce this, but our ZCash Wallet does as it is designed to maximize privacy.

Do Unified Addresses compromise privacy?

In our view, Unified Addresses can compromise privacy however in practice there is not much change. Unified Addresses contain the Transparent addresses and Transparent addresses create privacy risks via meta analysis. Some of this risk is discussed in ZCash Privacy and Metadata Analysis.

Essentially, if you were previously giving shielded addresses to service providers, then being forced to give Unified Addresses will leak metadata. For this reason we still allow you to provide only the Sapling or Transparent address. In practice and unfortunately almost no provider accepted shielded addresses. So, in cases you were giving Transparent addresses, then there is not an additional risk to your privacy though any interaction with a Transparent address in your wallet can increase metadata tracking risks.

Do Unified Addresses compromise ZCash quantum resistance?

That depends on the wallet implementation. If you use our ZCash Wallet, then there will not be a negative change to quantum resistance. However, some wallets when they later enforce shielding may send the shielded funds to a prior exposed Unified Address shielded receiver. Theoretically, if the public key of a shielded address is known, then it will have less quantum resistance. In this way, when shielding it is important to shield to addresses without prior exposure.

Details like this are why it is important to carefully select your wallet provider. If you care about security and privacy, then we recommend our ZCash Wallet.

ZCash can be bought on many exchanges, but these exchanges require intrusive KYC. Sometimes KYC demands are used as an excuse to freeze funds at more shady exchanges. Creating an account opens you to a lot of different tracking methods such as tracking your IP address, browser fingerprinting, or simply knowing the cluster of transactions that belong to your specific account. Due to Transparent addresses and Metanalysis this can compromise your wallets. Even your Shielded transactions.

That is why our ZCash Wallet enables you buy / sell ZEC. You can buy / sell even with your existing wallet. It does not require using the wallet functionality of the application. You can still take advantage an exchange or swap your Bitcoin or other coins for ZEC using our app.

How to buy / sell ZCash (ZEC) coin anonymously without KYC?

Download our wallet and look at the "Exchange / Trade" tab. Select ZEC and the other coin you want to use to swap. We will then search all the various exchangers and return to you the best exchanges with the best prices. If you decide to do the trade, then send the coins you want to swap to the provided address and 15 minutes later you will receive the coin you want to buy in your wallet.

Why is this more private than using a centralized exchange?

You have no account, so the cluster of your exchanges cannot be tracked. There is no browser fingerprinting. And, the exchange is done over the Tor Network. Central exchanges like Binance and Coinbase do not allow Tor connections and they can browser fingerprint. As a result, this is much more anonymous.

Unfortunately governments are increasingly violating the human right to privacy as they seek more control over their populations. The USA policy to sanction countries and individuals depends on being able to track fund flows across the world. After all, how can intermediaries that enforce sanctions stop transactions from A to B unless A and B no longer have privacy? As a result bureaucrat are creating more and more compliance requirements to erode privacy.

The effect of these government demands means intermediaries like Binance are under increasing pressure to meet more regulations. One such regulation is that the sending address for deposits must be known and not shielded. This creates issues for ZCash Shielded Addresses, Monero, and other coins that have privacy. As a result, Binance is threatening delisting unless they can guarantee deposits come from Transparent Addresses and not Shielded Addresses.

This reality means ZCash either needs to meet this requirement or it could potentially become delisted from Binance and other exchanges. In our opinion meeting this requirement will have minimal impact on privacy. However, considering this, meeting this requirement will likely only appease regulators for a short time and then they will demand more.

As of now it looks like the ZCash development team will make the necessary changes to appease Binance, so it should be safe from an immediate delisting. In whatever case we will make tools and education resources to ensure people know how to maintain the most privacy regardless of future changes. Our ZCash Wallet will continue to maximize privacy for each of our users and we intend to support efforts of decentralized exchanges so dependency on centralized services like Binanace are less.

Our ZCash Wallet uses many techniques to improve your privacy. One way this is done is using the Tor network. All wallet connections are routed over the Tor onion network which greatly increases privacy. Using ZCash without Tor will severely reduce your privacy due to meta analysis.

What is meta analysis and how does it reduce ZCash privacy?

Meta analysis is the use of non-blockchain data to help deanonymize a transaction. In this case, the primary metadata is 1) IP Addresses associated with each wallet 2) Transparent addresses associated with each wallet. Using these two data points it becomes easier to deanonymize many transactions. Shielded transactions provide a lot of privacy. However, privacy can be reduced by using meta analysis.

What is an example of meta analysis reducing ZCash privacy?

For example, when you connect to a ZCash server, then that server knows your IP address. If that IP address is your residential or another address connected to you, then it effectively knows your identity.

In addition to your IP address, that server knows every Transparent address associated with your wallet. So, let's pretend you connect with your residential IP address on day 1 and you connect over a VPN IP on day 2. By using the fingerprint of your Transparent addresses that server can conclude your VPN IP is associated with your Residential IP.

Now, let's pretend you send funds from a shielded address and you even did this from a very secrete Public Wifi IP. Due to your prior connections with a wallet with the same Transparent addresses from your Residential IP, then your Residential IP can be associated with this transaction even tho it does not involve any Transparent address. In addition, the server knows what time you sent the transaction, what block it was confirmed in, and if the receiver is a Transparent address then it likely knows who you conducted business with.

How to reduce meta-analysis and improve privacy?

The ZCash Wallet improves privacy by reducing metadata analysis. It does this by routing all wallet connections over the Tor network. The Tor network is an anonymization network that routes traffic through multiple other nodes before reaching it's destination. The result is that the receiver does not know your original IP address. Due to this there is no way to associate a wallet with a specific IP address and therefore your identity.

Zecwallet Lite was a popular ZCash Wallet, but unfortunately the development was discontinued in September 2022. Currently the wallet no longer works due to changes in the ZCash network since development stopped. Your coins are safe and all you need to do is change switch to ZCash Wallet.

ZCash Wallet is fully compatible with Zecwallet Lite and was developed as the successor to Zecwallet Lite. In order to gain access to your coins all you need to do is download the wallet and input your seed phrase. Both wallets are compatible with each other using the same seed phrase.

Unfortunately many ZCash wallets have not implemented ZIP-317 or even orchard addresses. The result is that funds cannot be sent from these wallets because the transaction will never be confirmed and accepted by the ZCash network. This issue can be resolved by installing ZCash Wallet.

Why does this ZCash transaction issue occur?

The root of the problem is an improper transaction fee being set in the wallet. The last year the ZCash network has been under a spam attack. This motivated the the development of ZIP-317 which is a set of rules for setting transaction fees. The hope was that it would reduce the effectiveness of the spam attack.

The problem is that many ZCash wallets are not well maintained, so have not been made compatible with ZIP-317. Since transactions created with those wallets do not create transactions with high enough fees it results in a situation where transactions cannot be confirmed.

Solution: how to properly send transactions

Install ZCash Wallet and import the mnemonic / seed used by the wallet with the stuck funds. Ensure to input the number of shielded addresses used by your other wallet. Once the wallet syncs you will have access to funds and the ability to send transactions with the correct fees.

ZecWallet Lite is an abandoned ZCash Wallet that some users have had trouble reclaiming stored funds. Funds from this wallet can be reclaimed by importing into ZCash Wallet. There are two main issues with the ZecWallet Lite wallet that are addressed in the ZCash Wallet.

ZecWallet Lite Issues

• Connect issues with error "Error: Couldn't get network from server, connection refused. Is the server address correct?". This error is because the default lightwalletd server used by ZecWallet Lite is no longer operational.
• Transaction errors where transactions have too low fees, so they never get confirmed by the network and therefore funds can no longer be moved from the wallet.

ZecWallet Lite troubleshooting solutions

Gaining access to frozen funds in ZecWallet is easy. ZCash Wallet has a compatible seed address derivation so it can be used to regain access to your wallet.

1. Download and install ZCash Wallet
2. Input your ZecWallet Lite seed when creating the ZCash wallet
3. Input the birthday / restore height used in ZecWallet
4. Count the number of shielded addresses used in ZecWallet. If this is 7 for example then input 7 in the "Number of Addresses" field

After doing this you will regain access to your ZCash funds.