Zcash’s monetary base is the same as Bitcoin’s — a fixed supply of 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC). Every 75 seconds, a new block is mined to the Zcash blockchain and a block reward of 1.5625 ZEC comes into circulation. The amount of the block reward cuts in half about every four years until all 21 million ZEC are in circulation. Zcash inflation almost precisely mimics that of Bitcoin. It’s important to note that as new coins are created, inflation goes down, and at each halvening the rate drops significantly.
As of November 2024, 80% of the Zcash block reward is distributed to miners, 8% is distributed to the Zcash Community Grants Committee (ZCG) to fund independent teams in the Zcash ecosystem, and 12% is distributed to a “lockbox” — a pool of issued funds tracked by the protocol. With no disbursement mechanism currently defined, the Zcash community will need to decide upon and specify a suitable decentralized mechanism for permitting withdrawals from this lockbox in the future to make these funds available for funding grants to ecosystem participants.
