Gemini has been working closely with the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) to obtain approval to offer Zcash trading and custody services for its customers as a New York trust company. This approval makes Gemini the first licensed Zcash exchange in the world. It also makes the NYSDFS the first regulatory agency in the world to supervise Zcash, reaffirming their position as the leading financial regulator in the area of digital assets.
Regulatory certainty and oversight are critical for both fostering innovation and protecting consumers — and Gemini is excited to provide its customers with a safe, secure, and regulated platform to buy, sell, and store Zcash. The exchange stated that it is proud to be supporting this new and incredible technology, and contributing to the next generation economy and the future of money.
Zcash is a friendly fork of the Bitcoin source code, making it a member of the “Nakamoto Family Tree” of virtual commodities. The Zcash protocol’s cutting edge use of zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (“zk-SNARKS” or “zero-knowledge proofs”) makes it a truly innovative privacy coin that offers confidentiality for peer-to-peer transactions similar to those afforded to fiat currency transfers (e.g., ACH, FedWire, SWIFT, etc.).
Zcash supports two types of addresses: unshielded addresses, which start with ‘t’ (i.e., “t-address”), and shielded addresses, which start with ‘z’ (i.e., “z-address”). At launch, Gemini will support deposits from both unshielded and shielded addresses, but will only support withdrawals to unshielded addresses. The exchange is working to support withdrawals to shielded addresses in the future.