BTC to ZEC: Swap Bitcoin to Zcash With No KYC

The ZEC is sent after your Bitcoin deposit reaches one to three confirmations. Bitcoin blocks average about 10 minutes, so that step usually sets the pace of the whole swap. Once it is done, most swaps finish within minutes.

Your wallet adds the Bitcoin network fee on top of the amount, and you choose how high it is. The fee is set per virtual byte of transaction data, so a wallet that spends many small coins at once builds a larger transaction and pays more. Sparrow and Electrum both show the fee rate before you sign; compare it with the current figures on mempool.space.

A transaction stuck with a low fee can be bumped in those wallets. The rate keeps floating until the deposit confirms, so a long wait in the mempool also means the ZEC amount moves with the market. Lightning payments cannot be used here: the deposit address is a normal on-chain Bitcoin address.

Zcash has two kinds of address. Transparent addresses start with t1 or t3 and work much like Bitcoin addresses: the amount and both ends of a payment are public. Shielded addresses hide them. Today most wallets hand out a unified address that starts with u1, and older shielded addresses start with zs.

The swap pays to a transparent address only. A u1 or zs address will not work as the payout address, even though it belongs to the same wallet. In Zodl (formerly Zashi), Zkool or Zingo, open the receive page and look for the address marked transparent; it is usually one tap away from the unified one.

Copy it, paste it, and check that it begins with t1 or t3. Use a transparent address you have not used before when your wallet offers one. A transparent address that has already received other payments ties this swap to that history on the public chain.

Zcash blocks come about every 75 seconds, and the payout confirms in about 10 to 20 minutes. At that point the ZEC sits in your transparent balance, visible to anyone who looks up the t-address on Blockchair.

To make it private, shield it. In Zodl, Zkool or Zingo, move the transparent balance into the shielded pool with the wallet's shield option. Shielding is an on-chain transaction with a small ZEC fee. Once it confirms, later payments from that balance hide the sender, the receiver and the amount.

The shielding step itself is visible: an observer can see that a certain amount left your t-address for the shielded pool. What they cannot see is where it goes after that. Leaving the ZEC in the pool for a while, and not sending the exact same amount out again soon after, makes it much harder to link the two ends.

In practice you use both. The transparent address is the door the ZEC comes in through, and the shielded pool is where it stays. All three address types can live in one wallet under the same seed phrase, so you do not need a second app. A unified address can even bundle a transparent receiver inside it, which is why wallets show the plain t-address separately. Write the seed down before you paste any address into the box: it is the only backup of both balances.

The Bitcoin address you enter as the sender address doubles as the refund address. If a swap cannot be completed, the BTC is refunded to the sender address you entered. Make it an address from Sparrow, Electrum or a hardware wallet that you control, not a withdrawal address from an exchange.

You get a swap ID and a page that tracks progress. Keep the page open, or save the swap ID, until the ZEC is in your wallet. You can also paste your Bitcoin transaction ID into mempool.space to see how many confirmations it has, and look up the Zcash payout on Blockchair once it is sent.

Most delays have a plain cause: a Bitcoin fee too low for the current mempool, or a deposit amount different from the one shown in the box. When neither of those applies and the page still shows no progress well past confirmation, write to support@ghostswap.io and include the swap ID plus the Bitcoin transaction ID. Hold off on any new deposit until support has replied.

Zcash started from Bitcoin's code and keeps much of its design: the same 21 million coin cap, a halving schedule and transparent addresses that work the same way. What it adds is the shielded pool, where zero-knowledge proofs let the network check a payment without seeing who paid whom or how much.

That makes ZEC a natural step for Bitcoin holders who want a private balance without leaving a Bitcoin-like asset. Shielded ZEC can also be shared selectively: a viewing key lets an accountant or a partner see the shielded transactions of an account without being able to spend from it.

Privacy in Zcash is opt-in, while Monero applies it to every transfer. Which suits you depends on whether you want a choice per payment or privacy by default; Zcash vs Monero sets out the differences. If you want XMR instead, use BTC to XMR.