People can send shielded Zcash using names such as alice instead of copying long addresses or scanning QR codes, bringing private peer-to-peer payments closer to the experience of payment apps.
Zcash Names opens Early Access today, giving people who reserved names the first opportunity to register them and use names such as alice instead of long Zcash addresses.
A Zcash name makes sending private digital money more like sending money to a username in a payment app. A sender can enter a name in their Zcash wallet instead of copying a long address or scanning a QR code.
Payments use Zcash’s shielded system, allowing the name to be shared publicly while keeping the sender, receiver, and amount hidden from public view on the blockchain.
Zcash Names is intended to close one of the usability gaps between cryptocurrency and payment apps while allowing peer-to-peer payments without a financial intermediary.
Fourteen wallets, explorers, and other apps, including Cake, Edge, Noir, and Zingo, integrated Zcash Names during earlier beta releases. A name can be used across participating apps rather than being tied to one wallet. An SDK is available to support integrations, and an explorer lets people resolve names to addresses and view the history of a name.
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Early Access and Registration
Early Access begins October 15, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern for people who reserved a name.
Reservations cost 0.005 ZEC and provide access to the registration queue. Reservations can be made until the queue closes.
Yearly registration starts at $20 for names of six characters or longer and increases for shorter names, up to $10,000 a year for a single-character name. Permanent registration costs three times the yearly price.
Open registration begins on October 30 or after all reserved participants have had an opportunity to register, whichever comes later.
As of publication, 10,802 names had been added to the waitlist since April. Of those, 973 had paid reservations since August 18.
Another 1,564 names are protected from public registration to reduce impersonation and name squatting. That group includes prominent names already registered through the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
How Zcash Names Works
Zcash does not support general-purpose smart contracts, so Zcash Names uses Zcash transactions to record who controls a name.
When the Zcash Names registrar accepts a registration or update, it records the name’s current state on Zcash, including its associated address, expiration, and a link to the previous state. Wallets use those records to determine who currently controls the name.
The name, the address it resolves to, and the history of registrations, updates, and releases are public. Payments made to a shielded Zcash address can remain shielded.
The registrar processes claims inside a trusted execution environment, a protected computing environment that restricts access to the software and data used in that process.
A Zcash-native naming system was also discussed at TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026. During “The Zcash Moment” on the OKX Main Stage on October 7, Balaji Srinivasan, founder of The Network State, said, “The next step will eventually be something like ZNS, which has all those good properties, but then has various levels of selective revelation with viewing keys.” Video of the remarks is available at https://x.com/ZcashNames/status/2107811296129515548.
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