About this Chart

Median fees are tracked separately across Zcash's three main chain value pools, each representing different levels of privacy and computational requirements:

• Transparent: Functions like Bitcoin with publicly visible addresses and amounts, requiring only basic cryptographic verification to validate transactions.

• Sapling: Uses zero-knowledge proofs called Groth16 to hide transaction details, requiring validators to verify mathematical proofs that demonstrate transactions are valid without revealing amounts or participants.

• Orchard: The latest and most private protocol using Halo2 proofs, offering the strongest privacy guarantees through more sophisticated cryptography that hides all transaction metadata while remaining efficient to validate.

The median metric shows the typical fee paid by most users rather than being skewed by outliers. Since April 2023, fees follow the ZIP 317 standard where each transaction costs 5,000 zatoshis (0.00005 ZEC) per logical action with a minimum of two actions.