Cryptocurrency exchange platform ShapeShift announced that it has integrated Zcash (ZEC), a decentralized and customer privacy-focused digital asset, to its blockchain exchange platform that enables customers worldwide to buy or sell Zcash instantly along with bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash and other digital assets.

According to the official release, the integration offers consumer privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash has the ability to hide the sender, recipient, and value of all transactions on the blockchain, offering total payment confidentiality.

“Zcash finally fulfills an early promise of Bitcoin technology - the ability to transact freely and privately with anyone in the world,” said ShapeShift Founder and CEO Erik Voorhees. “This protects the right to privacy held by all individuals on Earth, and opens up new commercial use cases which were impossible without truly confidential transactions.”

The Zcash protocol makes blockchains useful for a wide range of applications that the fully transparent blockchains cannot be used for; including fintech, healthcare and retail. ZEC technology allows blockchain network to maintain a secure ledger of balances without disclosing the parties or amounts involved in transactions.

“Zcash is a group of scientists and techies who came up with a way to combine blockchains with data security. These two things are well understood, important, and widely used, but have never been put together before now. The launch of the Zash protocol is the first of its kind. It is the accumulation of years of academic research, hard engineering work, and diligent security work,” Zcash CEO Zooko Wilcox said.