Zcash Names has opened Early Access, giving people who reserved names the first opportunity to register them and use handles such as "alice" in place of long Zcash addresses. The change targets a long-standing friction point in cryptocurrency: addresses are long strings that are difficult to share accurately or verify by eye, the kind of problem mainstream payment apps solved with username-style handles.

The feature is designed to make sending private digital money feel closer to sending money to a username in a payment app. Instead of copying a long address or scanning a QR code, a sender can simply enter a name in their Zcash wallet.

Payments initiated this way still run through Zcash's shielded system. The name itself can be shared publicly, while the sender, receiver, and amount remain hidden from public view on the blockchain. That split — a public name attached to shielded payment details — is what separates this model from naming systems on transparent blockchains, where the address and its full transaction history are open to anyone. According to the project, Zcash Names aims to close one of the usability gaps between cryptocurrency and mainstream payment apps while preserving peer-to-peer payments without a financial intermediary. Details are available on the official website, Zcash Names.

Fourteen wallets, explorers, and other applications — including Cake, Edge, Noir, and Zingo — integrated Zcash Names during earlier beta releases. A registered name works across participating apps rather than being tied to a single wallet. An SDK supports integrations, and an explorer allows users to resolve names to addresses and review a name's history.

Early Access and Registration

Early Access begins October 15, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern for people who reserved a name. Reservations cost 0.005 ZEC and provide access to the registration queue, and reservations can be made until the queue closes.

Annual registration starts at $20 per year for names of six characters or longer, with prices rising for shorter names, up to $10,000 per year for a single-character name. Permanent registration costs three times the corresponding yearly price.

Open registration begins on October 30, or after all reserved participants have had an opportunity to register, whichever comes later.

As of publication, 10,802 names had been added to the waitlist since April. Of those, 973 had paid reservations since August 18 — the conversion between those two figures is one thing to track as Early Access runs toward open registration on October 30. A further 1,564 names are protected from public registration to reduce impersonation and name squatting; that group includes prominent names already registered through the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), the naming system on Ethereum. Naming layers have become a common feature on smart-contract networks; Zcash Names carries the idea over to a chain where the name is public but the payment itself can stay hidden.

How Zcash Names Works

Because Zcash does not support general-purpose smart contracts, Zcash Names relies on Zcash transactions to record who controls a name. When the Zcash Names registrar accepts a registration or update, it records the name's current state on Zcash, including its associated address, expiration, and a link to the previous state. Wallets consult those records to determine who currently controls a name.

The name, the address it resolves to, and the history of registrations, updates, and releases are public. Payments made to a shielded Zcash address, however, can remain shielded. The processes claims inside a trusted execution environment — a protected computing environment that restricts access to the software and data used in that process.

A Zcash-native naming system was also discussed at TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026. During "The Zcash Moment" on the OKX Main Stage on October 7, Balaji Srinivasan, founder of The Network State, said, "The next step will eventually be something like ZNS, which has all those good properties, but then has various levels of selective revelation with viewing keys." Viewing keys are an existing Zcash mechanism that lets a user share read-only access to shielded transaction details without giving up control of funds. Video of the remarks is available at https://x.com/ZcashNames/status/2107811296129515548.