Since the demise of the Silk Road, mainstream financial institutions have shown significant interest in virtual currencies and particularly in the blockchain technology, which provides a new decentralized way to keep financial records and to power transactions of all sorts. Major central banks have recently been talking about using the technology for their own currencies.

Most projects in the virtual currency area, though, have been pushing in directions that would make it easier to integrate with the existing financial system.

Jonathan Levin, a founder of Chainalysis, a start-up that helps banks and regulators track activity on blockchains, said that the authorities had become comfortable with virtual currencies because they had been able to trace transactions in cases of criminal activity.

“It’s going to be quite difficult for Zcash in its opaqueness to show that, no, it is not all bad stuff going on,” he said.

But Mr. Wilcox has the help of a former top New York state financial regulator and a former federal prosecutor to help ease the concerns of government officials. Mr. Wilcox is hosting an open virtual meeting later this month with law enforcement officials from across the country to explain the project.

Mr. Wilcox and the programmers who created Zcash say that they developed the currency not to facilitate illegal activity but to provide a degree of privacy for people who do not want their financial transactions visible to the world.

“The basic story is that we have been gradually losing our privacy in a whole bunch of ways that people don’t appreciate,” said Matthew Green, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins who began developing Zcash with some of his graduate students in 2013. “This brings back a little bit of that privacy that computers have taken away from us. This technology gives us a defense against something that until now we have been defenseless against.”