We are excited to announce support for Zcash trading and custody. Starting on Saturday, May 19th at 9:30am EDT customers will be able to start depositing Zcash into their Gemini accounts. Trading will begin on Tuesday, May 22nd at 9:30am EDT. We will be offering the following new trading pairs and services:

When we began building Gemini over four years ago, we envisioned a platform that would allow customers to trade many virtual commodities. 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.).

We have been working closely with the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) to obtain approval to offer Zcash trading and custody services to our customers as a New York trust company. Our 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 we’re excited to provide our customers with a safe, secure, and regulated platform to buy, sell, and store Zcash. We are proud to be supporting this new and incredible technology, and contributing to the next generation economy and the future of money.

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 unshielded or shielded addresses, but will only support withdrawals to unshielded addresses. We are working to support withdrawals to shielded addresses in the future.

Onward and Upward,

Eric Winer