Zcash Foundation disowns ZRC-20 and CASH token

The Zcash Foundation has denied any connection to two third-party products, ZRC-20 and the CASH token, after a post published through its X account described them as additions to the Zcash network. Summary The Zcash Foundation says ZRC-20 and CASH have no official connection to the organization. ZRC-20’s draft specification relies on shielded memos and off-chain indexers. The proposed standard requires no Zcash protocol change or formal ZIP approval. U.S. investors must distinguish third-party tokens from products endorsed by a network’s developers. Zcash Foundation says it had no prior knowledge The Zcash Foundation said in a statement that it had not known about the ZRC-20 project or the related CASH token before the matter emerged publicly. According to the organization, both products come from an independent third party and are not official parts of the Zcash protocol. The clarification followed an X post published through the Foundation’s account that announced a token standard for Zcash. The post said ZRC-20 would soon allow users to deploy, mint, and transfer tokens on the privacy-focused blockchain, with CASH presented as the first token using the system. “Zcash now has a token standard,” the post said before directing users to the project’s website. You might also like: Zcash price enters discovery with $2,000 in sight In its later response, however, the Foundation rejected any association with the products and urged users to conduct their own research before interacting with them. The statement identified ZRC-20 as a privately developed system rather than a feature created, approved, or operated by the nonprofit. No public explanation has established how promotional material for an unrelated project appeared through the Foundation’s account. Without confirmation from the organization, the incident cannot be described as an account compromise or hack. Public information about the team operating ZRC-20 also remains limited. The project has released technical documentation and promotional pages, but the reviewed material does not clearly identify a company, legal entity, or group of named developers responsible for the system. ZRC-20 uses Zcash memos without changing its protocol According to the project’s technical documentation, ZRC-20 is a draft fungible-token specification that stores JSON instructions inside encrypted memo fields attached to shielded Zcash outputs. Independent indexers would read the instructions in block order and calculate token balances outside the Zcash consensus system. The documents describe three operations: deploy, mint, and transfer. A deployment would create a ticker and set its maximum supply, minting would issue units up to that limit, and transfers would move balances between accounts recognized by the indexer. ZRC-20 borrows its basic structure from Bitcoin’s BRC-20 format, but the proposed data carrier differs. BRC-20 records token instructions through Bitcoin inscriptions, while the ZRC-20 draft would place them in the 512-byte memo field available in shielded Zcash outputs.