Zcash launched on 28 October 2016 with no premine and no ICO. Instead, for the first four years, 20% of every block reward was paid not to the miner who found the block but to a fixed list of 48 addresses belonging to the founders, early investors, employees and advisors, the company now called Electric Coin Co., and the Zcash Foundation. The remaining 80% went to miners as normal.
It ran from the very first block to block 1,046,399 and stopped at the first halving on 18 November 2020, which is also when the block reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 ZEC. From that point miners took 100% of the reward, until the ZIP-1014 Dev Fund began taking a 20% slice again on a new set of rules.
The arithmetic is fixed by consensus, not by anyone's discretion:
| Blocks | Dates | Block reward | Founders' share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 – 19,999 | Oct–Nov 2016 | … | … |
| 20,000 – 653,599 | Nov 2016 – Dec 2019 | … | … |
| 653,600 – 1,046,399 | Dec 2019 – Nov 2020 | … | … |
| Total paid to the Founders' Reward addresses | … | ||
Two details in that table do real work. The first is the slow start: for the first 20,000 blocks the subsidy ramped up linearly from nothing, so launch week — when ZEC briefly printed above $19,000 on almost no liquidity — issued only a few dozen founders' coins in total. Had the reward run at full rate from block 1, the headline below would be materially larger, and materially more of a fiction.
The second is Blossom, at block 653,600: it halved the target block time from 150 to 75 seconds and halved the per-block subsidy to match. The reward per block fell, the reward per day did not. For essentially the whole four years the Founders' Reward ran at a steady 1,440 ZEC per day.
2,100,000 ZEC is exactly 10% of the 21,000,000 cap, and 20% of the 10,500,000 that consensus issued over those four years.
That day's Founders' Reward in ZEC, multiplied by that day's ZEC/USD close. This is the sell-as-you-receive figure — what the coins were worth on the day they landed, not what they became. The bars peak in the January 2018 mania and never come close again.
Both lines are dollars on one axis, so the gap between them is a real gap and not an artefact of two scales. Sold on receipt accumulates each day's coins at that day's close. Worth today takes the same coins, accumulated, and marks them at the current price. The distance between the two lines is the cost of having sold.
ZEC's daily close through the Founders' Reward era, on a log scale — the range spans three orders of magnitude and a linear axis would flatten three of the four years into the floor. The dashed line is the coin-weighted average price received: total dollars banked divided by total coins. Because issuance was flat at 1,440 ZEC a day, it is very close to a simple average of these closes.
| Year | ZEC received | Value on receipt | Average price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loading… | |||
2016 is two months and 2020 stops at the halving in November, which is why both are short years. Dates are UTC, matching how the chain and the daily closes are bucketed.
The 20% was split among several groups, and the split changed once, in mid-2018, when the company diluted the founders' share in favour of the company itself. As percentages of the whole block reward, as disclosed by Electric Coin Co.:
| Recipient | Before mid-2018 | After |
|---|---|---|
| Founders & vested employees | 12.8% | 9.6% |
| Electric Coin Co. & employee compensation | 4.2% | 8.2% |
| Zcash Foundation | 3.0% | 2.2% |
| Total | 20% | 20% |
These sub-splits are the one thing on this page not measured from the chain. Consensus paid all 48 addresses identically; how the recipients divided it among themselves is a matter of company disclosure, and different sources state it slightly differently. The 2,100,000 ZEC total and every dollar figure above are computed from the chain and the daily price series, and do not depend on this table being right.
What this measures. The Founders' Reward went to 48 transparent 2-of-3 multisig addresses, which means value only leaves one when its holders sign it out. We ask our own Zebra node's address index for the live unspent balance and the lifetime received total of each of the 48, so this is read from the chain rather than from an explorer.
What it does not measure. “Moved” is not “sold”. A coin leaving a reward address went somewhere, and for most of this the somewhere was a shielded pool, at which point the chain stops answering questions about it by design. Nothing on this page can tell you what any recipient did next. Note also that lifetime received at these addresses runs a little above the 2,100,000 ZEC consensus issued, because anyone can pay a transparent address and a small amount of unrelated dust has arrived over the years.
Coins come from the consensus schedule — the slow-start ramp, the flat 2.5 ZEC, the post-Blossom 1.25 ZEC — evaluated block by block and bucketed into UTC days using the block heights our own index recorded for each day. The schedule is exact and its total is pinned by test to 2,100,000 ZEC; it is used rather than summed coinbase outputs because a coinbase transaction bundles the miner's subsidy, the fees and the founders' fifth into one figure that this database does not split apart.
Prices are daily ZEC/USD closes from CoinGecko, the same series every other chart on this site uses. Days with no price are counted in the coin total and excluded from the dollar total rather than being valued at zero; the figure below reports whether any such days exist.
This is a mark, not a simulation. It says what the day's coins were worth at the day's price. It does not model what would have happened to that price if 1,440 ZEC had actually been dumped into it every day — in 2016 and 2017 that was a meaningful fraction of real daily volume, so the true realisable number is lower, probably materially so. It also ignores taxes, exchange access, custody and the vesting schedules that stopped most recipients from selling on receipt even if they had wanted to. Read it as an upper bound on the cash, and as an honest answer to “what was this worth at the time”.