A new cryptocurrency was born on Friday: Ycash was spawned in a so-called “friendly-fork” of Zcash and aspires to “empower local communities to take control over the money they earn, spend and save”.

The fork was originally scheduled to happen on Thursday, June 18 at block 570,000, but was slightly delayed and eventually occurred at 7:36:51pm Pacific Time (02:36.51am UTC) on Friday.

Development

First announced in April, the fork was led by Howard Loo – an attorney and software developer and long-time supporter of Zcash. 

He said on Medium the foundation of Ycash was to uphold a promise that the cap on Zcash’s Founder’s Reward – a 20% tariff on block rewards that goes to developer funding – would be forever capped at 2.1 million coins.

He added on the Medium blog post:

We believe that both mining on commodity hardware and maintaining the promised cap on the Founders Reward are essential to a fair distribution of coins. In turn, we believe that a fair distribution of coins is essential to ultimately achieving widespread adoption.

The initial block on the Ycash blockchain was mined by the Luxor Mining Pool. It said on its Twitter feed: “The Ycash fork has gone smoothly, and yours truly found the first block.”

The fork was supported by SafePay, Bitpie Wallet, Guarda Wallet, Atomic Wallet and Cobo Wallet and those Zcash holders who used these wallets would – at the time of the fork – have received a corresponding amount of the new Ycash coins.

Loo explained:

In order to access Ycash coins, you need to have your Zcash coins at the time of the fork in a wallet that allows you to export your private keys.

So What’s the Difference?

At launch, Ycash will differ from Zcash in three important ways:

  • A tweaked version of the Equihash mining algorithm currently used on the Zcash network will prohibit specialized mining hardware called ASICs from mining on the Ycash network. The long-term goal to prevent ASICs from adapting to the tweaks will be to replace Equihash entirely.
  • Ycash will reduce the Founder’s Reward rate from the 20% on the Zcash network, to just 5% on Ycash which will provide funds a non-profit organization called the Ycash Foundation.
  • Cosmetic changes to address formats to make it impossible to accidentally send Zcash to a Ycash address or vice versa.