A major difference between most cryptocurrencies and traditional money is that every transaction is tracked and managed on a decentralized, public blockchain, instead of by a centralized institution, like a bank. This means you truly own your money. Most cryptocurrencies expose your full transaction history and holdings to everyone. With Zcash, you control what information you share. Zcash’s developers use a method called a zk-SNARK (for “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge”) to give users the power to transact anonymously. That’s not normally possible in Bitcoin and most other public blockchain systems, in which transactions are visible to everyone. Though these transactions are theoretically anonymous, they can be combined with other data to track and even identify users. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, the world’s second-most-popular blockchain network, has described zk-SNARKs as an “absolutely game-changing technology.”