Since writing this WinZEC has reached end of life and it is recommended that users switch to zec-qt-wallet due to its ongoing support and updated feature set. Simply install zec-qt-wallet and it will use the existing data directory and wallet from WinZEC.

WinZEC (formerly Zcash4Win) was the first port of the official Zcash client (known as zcashd) to Windows. As a result, it still powers a large proportion of the Zcash nodes on the network for those who wish to use shielded transactions on a Windows machine.

WinZEC is comprised of two major components, the Swing wallet GUI(the interface that you see when you open WinZEC) originally by vaklinov and the Windows port of zcashd by radix42. Essentially, WinZEC starts a zcashd instance when it is opened, and the Swing wallet connects to it via the RPC interface and makes the process of interacting with the zcashd client simpler and offers an alternative and easier to use interface than using the command line. However, there are some instances where you will want to customise your WinZEC experience or where the GUI is unable to recover from certain situations where manually communicating with the underlying zcashd instance is the better/only option.

In addition, users are typically somewhat reticent to upgrade for fear of losing funds. However, this is mainly unfounded if backups are taken and the process of where and how the data is stored is better understood which this article and series of screencasts hope to address.

Installing WinZEC

WinZEC can be downloaded from https://winzec.com/. At the time of writing the latest release is v1.1.2.

After downloading WinZEC, you can verify the SHA-256 checksum of the v1.1.2 release 12b7cb972f2a3b29b9e70e2104ff75ccbee52df25831cf990b85a5244eaf95e1 on Windows by using a utility such as this which should match the published checksum (see the video below for a demonstration of this).

Once downloaded and verified, you can open the installer and click through to complete the process. This will install the WinZEC application into C:\Program Files\winzec .

The first time the application is opened a number of tasks are run:

A data directory is created to store the wallet and blockchain data. By default, this is C:\Users\your-username\AppData\Roaming\Zcash (replace your-username with your username).

(replace your-username with your username). A sample configuration file is created with sensible defaults in zcash.conf in the same directory.

in the same directory. The verifying and proving keys are downloaded that are required to construct and validate the zero-knowledge proofs. The proving key is a large file (~900MB) so this process will take a while to complete and will be downloaded to C:\Users\your-username\AppData\Roaming\ZcashParams .

Note that Sapling has additional parameters required so if you want to run on testnet, you will need these extra parameters. See this file for more information and location of downloads.

Now, take a look at the contents of the C:\Users\your-username\AppData\Roaming\Zcash directory (note you may need to enable the checkbox to view Hidden Items in the file explorer to browse to this directory). The files of most interest to us are:

zcash.conf — the configuration file for zcashd.

— the configuration file for zcashd. wallet.dat — your wallet file.

— your wallet file. debug.log — a debug log useful for diagnosing errors.