Stacked area showing the total ZEC held in each shielded pool over time. Sprout is the oldest and is shrinking. Sapling was the largest for years. Orchard is growing. Ironwood is the newest. The total shielded value is tracked via the transparent turnstile — every ZEC entering or leaving a shielded pool crosses the transparent boundary.
Shielded Supply was 4.89M ZEC on 2026-09-27, the last full day of data. That is 0.8% higher than 28 days ago, when it was 4.86M ZEC.
🔗 permalink ⇆ compareZcash has had four shielded pools, and they are generations rather than alternatives. Sprout (2016) was the original and is deprecated; Sapling (2018) made shielded transactions practical; Orchard (Network Upgrade 5, 2022) replaced it; Ironwood is the newest. Value moves forward through them, which is why the old pools trend down and the newest trends up — a falling Sapling line is usually migration, not people giving up on privacy.
Every crossing is visible even though the contents are not. A shielded pool's total is enforced by consensus: value entering or leaving crosses the transparent turnstile and is counted, so these balances are exact rather than estimated. What stays hidden is everything inside — who holds it, in what amounts, and moving to whom.
What this is not. It is not a measure of how much Zcash activity is private. A balance sitting in a pool is an upper bound on shielded value. Coins can rest there for years without a single private payment being made. And a coin that is shielded and then immediately deshielded at the same amount can be trivially linked anyway. For how much of the supply sits shielded see the shielding rate; for whether a deshield is actually covered, the anonymity set is the honest number.