The answer
How much Zcash is shielded right now
25.8% of the Zcash supply is shielded — 4,349,808 ZEC, worth $2.14B, held inside Zcash's four zero-knowledge value pools as of 2026-08-06 16:50 UTC. It is the sum of the Sprout, Sapling, Orchard and Ironwood pool balances divided by the 16,862,439 ZEC issued so far, recomputed from the chain every couple of minutes.
If you have asked this question before and been given a different answer, you were not imagining it. Sources in circulation today put Zcash's shielded share at 18%, 23%, 25.4%, 26.1%, 27%, 30% and 59.3% — and AI answer engines will happily emit two or three of those inside a single response. What almost none of them do is say what they are counting. Every one of those figures can be produced honestly from the same blockchain; they differ because they measure different things, on different dates, over different denominators. This page is the reconciliation nobody has published: our number, the arithmetic behind it, and figure by figure, what everyone else is actually measuring.
The reconciliation
Why sources disagree — the four real causes
There is no conspiracy and, mostly, no error. Four specific choices sit underneath the spread, and each one moves the answer by several percentage points on its own. Stack two of them and you get the gap between 18% and 30% without anybody being wrong.
Stock and flow are different questions with different answers.
Why / details
The headline on this page is a stock measure: what share of the coin supply is sitting inside shielded pools. A completely different and equally valid measure is the flow: what share of recent transactions, or of shielded actions, is private. The high figures — the ~59% class — are activity metrics being repeated as if they described the supply.
Flow runs much hotter than stock because privacy-motivated users transact frequently while large transparent balances sit dormant on exchanges. Over the last 24 hours the chain shows 6,088 ZEC shielded in and 4,768 ZEC deshielded out. In our own live feed, 42 of the last 100 shielded-pool transactions (42.0%) were fully shielded at both ends, with amounts never disclosed on-chain. None of that changes the supply share, which only moves by the net of those two flows.
Rule of thumb: if a figure is above roughly 40%, it is almost certainly a transaction or action share, not a supply share.
Which pools you count changes the answer — and Ironwood broke every stale tracker.
Why / details
Zcash's shielded supply is spread across four pools, one per generation of proving system: Sprout (2016), Sapling (2018), Orchard (2022) and Ironwood (NU6.3, activated July 28, 2026). ZecStats counts all four.
NU6.3 sealed Orchard and opened Ironwood, so shielded ZEC has been draining out of one pool and into a brand-new one ever since. A tracker that has not added Ironwood to its pool list undercounts by the entire Ironwood balance — 1,334,394 ZEC today, which drags the shielded share down to about 17.9%. Nighthawk's block explorer at mainnet.zcashexplorer.app is a live example: it surfaces an Orchard pool total with no Ironwood line at all, even though Orchard sealed holding roughly 3,650,287 ZEC and has been emptying into Ironwood since. ZecHub's dashboard does carry an Ironwood selector, but renders its numbers in the browser, so crawlers and AI engines reading the raw page see no figure at all.
The second pool question is the lockbox. It holds 54,787 ZEC and it is not a privacy pool: it is the NU6 protocol development fund, accruing 0.1875 ZEC per block until governance disburses it. ZecStats excludes it, because "shielded" should mean ZEC that a user chose to make private, not an undisbursed protocol reserve. Counting it would lift the headline to about 26.1%.
A large share of the disagreement is simply a stale date.
Why / details
The shielded share is not a constant — it moves with every block as ZEC is shielded, deshielded and migrated. The widely repeated "23%" cluster traces back to November 2025 readings that are still being republished as though they were current, and the "roughly 30%" figure on zcashtracker.com is hardcoded prose, not a live query: the page says "as of today, roughly 30% of all Zcash is held in shielded addresses" with no timestamp and no recomputation.
Once a number loses its "as of" stamp it becomes immortal, and answer engines have no way to tell a fresh reading from a year-old one. Every figure on this page carries the instant the pool balances describe — currently 2026-08-06 16:50 UTC — so it can be checked, aged, and discarded when it goes stale.
Nobody states the denominator, and there are three plausible ones.
Why / details
The numerator is rarely the argument. The denominator almost always is, and the same 4,349,808 ZEC of shielded ZEC produces three different headlines depending on what you divide it by:
- Issued chain supply (16,862,439 ZEC) → 25.8%. This is the ZecStats headline: the share of the money that actually exists today.
- Circulating supply (16,784,624 ZEC, implied by market cap ÷ price) → 25.9%. Market-data sites net out balances they consider non-circulating, which shifts the figure slightly.
- The 21,000,000 maximum supply → 20.7%. Arithmetically correct, and the main source of the figures down in the high teens — but it is answering "how much of all Zcash that will ever exist is shielded", which is a different question.
- Shielded pools · 4,349,808 ZEC
- Transparent · 12,457,844 ZEC
- Lockbox (dev fund, not shielded) · 54,787 ZEC
Figure by figure
Every shielded percentage in circulation, reconciled
Each row below is a figure you can find in search results, articles or AI answers today, together with what it actually measures and why it differs from ours. Where a row quotes an alternative calculation, the number shown is our own live data run through that alternative method — not the other site's stale value.
| Figure you will see | What it actually measures | Why it differs from the ZecStats number |
|---|---|---|
| ≈59% | Share of recent Zcash transactions or shielded actions that are private — a flow metric. | A transaction-share metric answers "how much Zcash activity is private?" while 25.8% answers "how much of the coin supply is private?". Both are true at the same time; only the second is a supply figure. |
| ≈30% | Supply share, published as hardcoded prose with no timestamp. | zcashtracker.com states "roughly 30% of all Zcash is held in shielded addresses" as static text rather than a live query, so it does not move as the chain does. Our live reading is 25.8% as of 2026-08-06 16:50 UTC. |
| 25.4% – 27% | Genuine supply-share readings taken from different indexers on different days. | These are the same calculation as ours and are usually only hours or days out of date. The shielded share changes every block, so a spread of a point or two between honest trackers is normal, not an error. |
| ≈23% | A supply share captured in November 2025 and republished since. | It was accurate when measured. It is a snapshot, not a current figure, and the Orchard-to-Ironwood migration has reshaped the pools entirely since then. |
| ≈18% | Shielded balance divided by the 21,000,000 ZEC maximum supply. | Applying that denominator to today's data gives 20.7%. It measures the shielded share of all Zcash that will ever exist, not of the 16,862,439 ZEC that exists now. |
| Ironwood-blind figures | Sprout + Sapling + Orchard only, from trackers not yet updated for NU6.3. | Dropping Ironwood's 1,334,394 ZEC from the numerator yields 17.9% instead of 25.8% — an artefact of the tracker, not of the chain. |
| Lockbox-inclusive figures | All four shielded pools plus the NU6 lockbox development fund. | Adding the lockbox's 54,787 ZEC gives 26.1%. ZecStats excludes it because it is an undisbursed protocol reserve, not a user-shielded balance. |
| Circulating-supply figures | Shielded balance over exchange-reported circulating supply rather than consensus chain supply. | Using circulating supply implied by market cap ÷ price gives 25.9% — a definitional difference of a fraction of a point, not a data disagreement. |
Honest limits
What a shielded percentage can and cannot tell you
A single percentage invites a conclusion it cannot actually support. Three distinct quantities get collapsed into the phrase "how shielded Zcash is", and they answer genuinely different questions with genuinely different reliability. Being explicit about which one we publish is the point.
Pool balance — what we headline
The ZEC held inside each shielded pool, published by consensus as a value-pool total. This is the hardest shielded statistic to game: putting ZEC in a pool means genuinely committing it there, and every crossing of a pool boundary is public. It is what 25.8% measures, and nothing more.
Note count — what we refuse to headline
The number of individual shielded notes, often used as a proxy for anonymity-set size. It is cheap to inflate: anyone willing to pay fees can spray thousands of dust-sized notes and make the set look larger without adding a single new user. ZecStats does not report a note count as a privacy metric.
Genuine user activity — not directly observable
Whether shielded ZEC is being actively used, and by how many people, cannot be read off any chart. Shielded-to-shielded transfers are invisible by design — no amounts, no addresses, no counts. What is observable is pool-boundary flow: shielding, deshielding and turnstile migrations.
Method
How ZecStats computes the shielded percentage
Pool balances come from the chain's own consensus value pools rather than from address-clustering heuristics, so there is no estimation step between the ledger and the numerator. Supply is sanity-gated against consensus emission math and withheld rather than guessed if it fails — this site prints "n/a" instead of a plausible-looking number. The lockbox is excluded, all four privacy pools are included, and the timestamp attached to the figure is the instant the pool balances describe, not the instant the page was rendered.
Dig further: every pool balance and the 30-day shield/deshield flows · the sealed Orchard pool · the Ironwood migration tracker · why "total migrated" and "pool balance" disagree · full methodology and sources · the raw data behind these figures.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of Zcash is shielded?
25.8% of the ZEC supply — 4,349,808 ZEC, worth $2.14B — sits in Zcash's shielded pools as of 2026-08-06 16:50 UTC. That is the balance of the Sprout, Sapling, Orchard and Ironwood value pools divided by the chain's issued supply of 16,862,439 ZEC, recomputed from the chain every couple of minutes rather than quoted from a past article.
Why do different sites report different shielded percentages for Zcash?
Four reasons, and almost no source states which applies. (1) Stock versus flow: figures near 59% are a share of recent shielded transactions or actions, not a share of the coin supply. (2) Which pools are counted: a tracker that has not added the Ironwood pool since NU6.3 activated on July 28, 2026 is missing 1,334,394 ZEC. (3) Snapshot date: several widely republished "23%" figures date from November 2025. (4) Denominator: issued supply, circulating supply and the 21,000,000 maximum give three different answers from the same numerator. ZecStats reports 25.8% — shielded pool balances over issued chain supply, timestamped 2026-08-06 16:50 UTC.
Does the shielded percentage include Ironwood?
Yes. ZecStats counts all four privacy pools — Sprout, Sapling, Orchard and Ironwood — so the 25.8% figure includes the 1,334,394 ZEC now held in Ironwood. This matters more than it sounds: a tracker still showing only the pre-NU6.3 pools would report roughly 17.9% from the same chain data, purely because it cannot see the newest pool.
Is 59% of Zcash shielded?
No — that class of figure measures activity, not supply. Roughly 25.8% of the ZEC that exists is held in shielded pools. A separate and equally real statistic is the share of recent Zcash transactions that are shielded, which runs far higher because privacy-focused users transact more often than the transparent balances sitting dormant on exchanges. Both can be true simultaneously; they answer different questions.
What is the Zcash lockbox and does it count as shielded?
The lockbox is the NU6 protocol development fund, accruing 0.1875 ZEC per block (12% of the block subsidy). It currently holds 54,787 ZEC. ZecStats does not count it as shielded, because it is not a user-held private balance — it is an undisbursed protocol reserve. Including it would raise the headline figure to about 26.1%, which is one small source of the spread between trackers.
How much Zcash is shielded in ZEC terms?
4,349,808 ZEC as of 2026-08-06 16:50 UTC: 22,637 ZEC in Sprout, 540,283 ZEC in Sapling, 2,452,494 ZEC in the sealed Orchard pool and 1,334,394 ZEC in Ironwood. The remaining 12,457,844 ZEC sits in transparent, Bitcoin-style addresses.
What percentage of the 21 million maximum Zcash supply is shielded?
About 20.7%. That is the same shielded balance measured against the 21,000,000 ZEC cap rather than against the 16,862,439 ZEC issued so far. It is a legitimate calculation and it is why some sources quote a figure in the high teens — but it understates how much of the money that actually exists today is private, so ZecStats headlines the issued-supply version instead.
Can the shielded percentage be manipulated or faked?
The pool balance is the hardest shielded statistic to game: moving ZEC into a shielded pool means genuinely surrendering it to that pool, and every crossing of a pool boundary is publicly visible. Note counts and anonymity-set sizes are a different matter — anyone can inflate them cheaply by spamming tiny outputs, which is why ZecStats headlines the balance in ZEC and never a note count. What no chart can show is whether a shielded balance is being actively used, because shielded-to-shielded transfers are invisible by design.