How many Zcash (ZEC) are there?

There are 16,943,549 ZEC in existence — 80.7% of Zcash's hard cap of 21,000,000 ZEC — with 4,056,451 ZEC still left to mine. Read from the chain at 2026-09-20 23:21 UTC.

Zcash's maximum supply is 21,000,000 ZEC — the same hard cap as Bitcoin, chosen deliberately when Zcash launched in 2016. The cap is enforced by consensus rules: the block subsidy halves every 1,680,000 blocks and no rule permits issuance beyond the schedule, so raising it would require a network upgrade the whole network adopted.

4,056,451 ZEC have not been issued yet — 19.3% of the 21,000,000 cap. Those coins enter circulation only as block subsidy, 1.5625 ZEC at a time, and the rate halves at every halving. Because each era issues roughly half of the previous one, the unmined remainder shrinks quickly at first and then very slowly.

About 1,800 ZEC of new supply is created per day. The arithmetic is public: 1.5625 ZEC per block at a 75-second target is roughly 1,152 blocks a day.

Zcash's annual issuance rate is 3.9% — a year of emission at the current subsidy measured against the 16,943,549 ZEC already issued. It falls continuously, both because the denominator grows and because each halving cuts the numerator in half. The next halving is at block 4,406,400, around November 2028; the live countdown is on the halving page.

The interesting question is not how many ZEC exist but where they sit. Zcash's consensus rules track the supply across six value pools, and the balance of each one is public even when the transactions inside it are not. Every balance below is a live consensus figure, as of 2026-09-20 23:21 UTC.

Read down that table and you have the whole answer: 70.6% of issued ZEC is transparent, 29.0% is shielded across four privacy pools, 0.4% is in the lockbox, and the rest of the cap has never been mined.

11,967,072 ZEC — 70.6% of issued ZEC — sits in transparent, Bitcoin-style UTXOs where addresses, amounts and history are fully public. Exchange balances, mining payouts and most newly issued coins land here first, which is why the transparent pool is the largest by a wide margin.

4,911,957 ZEC — 29.0% of issued ZEC, worth $7.45B — is held across the four shielded pools. Net movement across the transparent boundary over the last 24 hours was −2,437 ZEC. The pool-by-pool breakdown and the 30-day flow chart live on the shielded pools page, and the share itself on the shielded percentage page.

The lockbox holds 64,520 ZEC. It is not a privacy pool: it is a consensus-level development reserve that accrues 0.1875 ZEC per block — 12% of the block subsidy under NU6 — and it cannot be spent until Zcash governance defines a disbursement mechanism. Those coins are issued but, by construction, not circulating.

Every issued ZEC is in exactly one of the six pools, so the pools must sum to chain supply. That identity is the single most useful check on any Zcash supply figure, and it is checked on every refresh here.

Consensus rules define the maximum that could have been issued by a given block height. Actual supply usually sits a few hundred ZEC under it, because coinbase outputs are not always claimed in full — an unclaimed subsidy is simply never created.

ZecStats implements that emission schedule independently and checks every reported supply figure against it. A supply outside the envelope is withheld, not published: a wrong supply number is worse than no supply number. The gate is documented on the methodology page.

"Circulating supply" and "chain supply" are different quantities, and conflating them is the most common error in ZEC supply figures. Chain supply is what consensus has issued: 16,943,549 ZEC. Circulating supply is a market-data convention that excludes coins deemed unavailable — and each provider applies its own definition.

Zcash has an obvious candidate for exclusion: the 64,520 ZEC lockbox, issued but unspendable. ZecStats publishes the chain figure, names it as such, and does not quietly substitute one definition for the other.

Zcash's market capitalisation is $25.66B, ranked #9 among all cryptocurrencies. Multiplying the current ZEC price by chain supply instead gives $25.69B — a gap of about 0.1%.

The two are rarely identical, and the difference is definitional rather than an error: market cap is computed on a provider's circulating supply, which differs from what the chain has issued. Live price, history and comparisons are on the ZEC price page.

Issuance halves every 1,680,000 blocks. The next halving is at block 4,406,400 — 915,900 blocks away, around November 2028 — when the subsidy drops from 1.5625 to 0.78125 ZEC per block, and daily issuance halves with it.

So new ZEC does not all reach the market: under NU6 each block's 1.5625 ZEC splits 80% to miners, 8% to Zcash Community Grants and 12% into the lockbox. The full era-by-era emission table is on the halving page.

Yes — and this is the part most supply pages skip. Shielded balances are tracked by consensus as public value pools, so the total inside each pool is always known even though individual notes are not. Every crossing between pools reveals its amount publicly: shielding, deshielding, and turnstile migrations such as the sealed Orchard pool draining into Ironwood.

That is the deliberate trade-off. Privacy holds inside a pool; the boundaries are public so the money supply stays checkable. If a counterfeiting bug had ever been exploited inside an old circuit, the turnstile is where the books would fail to balance.

Same cap, different curve. Both stop at 21,000,000 coins and both halve on roughly a four-year rhythm, but Zcash targets 75-second blocks against Bitcoin's ten minutes, halving every 1,680,000 blocks — the same emission delivered through many more, much smaller rewards. Zcash also splits each subsidy with ecosystem funding (8% grants, 12% lockbox), where Bitcoin's entire subsidy goes to miners.

Chain supply and every pool balance are read from a Zcash node's consensus state at the chain tip, then checked against an independently implemented emission schedule before publication. Price and market cap come from a market-data provider, cross-checked against an exchange feed. Nothing on this page is estimated or interpolated, and nothing is filled in from a previous value without being stamped stale: a figure we cannot source is left blank instead. Full per-metric provenance is on the methodology page, and the same figures are available as JSON at /api/zec/summary.

Go deeper on any row above: Zcash shielded pools · what percentage of ZEC is shielded · Orchard pool balance · Ironwood migration tracker · Ironwood reconciliation · Zcash network stats · halving countdown · ZEC price · methodology · data downloads.