Zcash sits in an awkward and interesting place. It is a privacy coin that custodians will still list, which means it is accepted far more widely than Monero — and it has an optional-privacy design, which means a donation to the wrong kind of address is no more private than Bitcoin.
That second point matters more than the list, and almost nobody writing about charitable ZEC mentions it.
Every organisation below was checked on 1 October 2026 by loading that organisation's own page. Not a directory, not a press release, not another article.
Coin lists change without warning. This is a snapshot with a date on it.
The short answer
| Organisation | Also accepts | How they receive it |
|---|---|---|
| The Tor Project | BTC, DOGE, ETH, LTC, XMR, XLM | Self-hosted BTCPay, own addresses |
| Riseup | BTC, XMR, ETH, BCH | Own published addresses |
| GrapheneOS Foundation | BTC, XMR, ETH, ADA, LTC | Own published addresses (transparent) |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | BTC, ETH, LTC, XMR, XLM | Not stated on their donate page |
| charity: water | BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, FIL, DOGE | Own published addresses |
Five organisations, four of them demonstrably self-custodying. That is a better showing than Dogecoin, where we found two.
The thing to understand before you send ZEC
Zcash has two kinds of address. A transparent address, usually starting t, behaves like Bitcoin: the amount, sender and recipient are visible to anyone forever. A shielded address, usually starting z, encrypts those details.
A charity that publishes a transparent address is accepting Zcash the asset without offering Zcash the privacy. Your donation is as public as a Bitcoin one. GrapheneOS, for instance, publishes transparent addresses.
This is not a criticism of those organisations. Transparent addresses are easier to account for, easier to audit and easier to hand to a bookkeeper, and many charities have good reasons to prefer them. But if your reason for choosing ZEC was privacy, check which letter the address starts with before you send, because the coin alone does not decide it.
The same logic cuts the other way, and we should be straight about our own position: if you want your gift to be publicly verifiable, a transparent address is the right tool and a shielded one defeats the purpose. Both are legitimate goals. They are just different ones, and no charity's marketing should blur them. We made the same argument about Monero, where the choice is not optional.
Why Zcash beats Monero on acceptance
The reason is structural rather than ideological, and it is the same reason in reverse that we documented for Monero.
When a large charity advertises "over 100 cryptocurrencies", it has signed up with a donation processor that uses a custodian to hold the coins. Exchange delistings pushed Monero out of that custodial supply chain over the years. Zcash, with its optional-privacy design and transparent-by-default addresses, largely stayed in it.
So a humanitarian charity can reach Zcash through the normal route, and cannot reach Monero at all without running its own wallet. That difference — not any judgement about privacy — is most of why the two lists look so different.
A caution about second-hand lists
You will find pages claiming the Electronic Frontier Foundation accepts a long tail of privacy coins. When we checked EFF's own cryptocurrency page during earlier research, Monero was not among the coins listed, despite being widely reported as accepted.
We mention it here because it is the failure mode of this entire genre, including ours: a claim gets made once, repeated by people who did not check, and outlives the fact by years. That is why this page carries a date and names the day we looked.
How to check any of this yourself
- Open the organisation's own domain. Not a directory, not a search summary, not this page.
- Find the coin list. If there isn't one, it is a processor's dropdown.
- For Zcash specifically, look at the address prefix.
tis public;zis shielded. - Look for a date. An undated crypto page is often years stale.
- If they claim a public ledger, open it and click through to a block explorer to confirm a transaction exists.
Where we stand
TraceGood accepts Zcash, alongside more than thirty other coins and networks. Every confirmed donation appears on our public ledger with a link to the transaction on an independent block explorer.
That last point deserves the honest footnote this article has been arguing for: a shielded ZEC gift cannot be verified by a stranger the way a transparent one can. That is the trade-off you are choosing, not a gap in our record-keeping, and we would rather state it than let a ledger imply more than it can show.
We are a newly founded organisation whose registration as a non-profit association in Estonia is not yet complete, and donations to us are not tax-deductible anywhere. Our About page carries the full position.
If something here is wrong, or a page has changed since we checked, tell us and we will correct it.