Zcash May Be Getting Spammed but the Blockchain Is Doing Just Fine, the Company Behind It Says

The Zcash blockchain is experiencing a sudden increase in size due to higher transaction volumes, prompting concerns of a potential spam attack.

Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief technology officer of bitcoin storage company Casa, claims the Zcash blockchain has tripled in size to over 100GB in a matter of months.

Electric Coin Co. (ECC), the organization behind Zcash, issued a statement on Twitter addressing the concerns and assured users that Zcash was functioning normally.

“The vast majority of Zcash users are unaffected by the increased size of the blockchain, but users of shielded wallets are reporting slower than normal sync times due to a high volume of transactions with a high number of outputs. While Zcash is functioning as designed, the ECC engineering team is focused on improving performance,” the statement read.

"Since Zcash is increasingly important, both to adversaries of freedom and to defenders of freedom, it is getting more and more attention," Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, CEO and founder of ECC, told CoinDesk. "But the narrative that there is something wrong and Zcash is vulnerable to attack or is failing is false."

He added, "In fact, Zcash has already rapidly improved to handle the increased load."

The price of Zcash token ZEC is holding steady, trading at $55.29 at the time of publication.

UPDATE (Oct. 7, 2022, 14:37 UTC): Adds comments from Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn.

CORRECTION: (Oct. 24, 2022, 16:34 UTC): Fixes the spelling of the name of the company behind Zcash.