So new in version 1.0.14 is the ability to track the total amount of shielded ZEC in the Sprout circuit:
Nodes can now track the total amount of shielded ZEC inside the Sprout circuit. This is measured by adding up the ZEC moving between the Transparent Value Pool and JoinSplits (see Anatomy of a Zcash Transaction). getblockchaininfo shows the total for the entire chain, while getblock will show the total as of a specific block.
So assuming I interpret this correctly there are ~116,000 ZEC in shielded addresses (out of ~ 3 Million ZEC in existence). So that’s around 4% of the total supply are actually in shielded addresses.
With your experience with this new auditing tool, It would be great to have a article explanation of how it address the criticism of Zcashs lack of supply audit-ability.
It should also be noted that the Zchain explorer has been very buggy lately and the maintainers of it haven’t been heard from recently. I would suggest for anyone doing an audit use a different explorer like
Thanks @Shawn, I’m glad you brought this up as I was doing some thinking about it along those lines but wasn’t sure I was on the right track.
My primitive understanding is let’s assume someone can and has generated a gazillion ZEC we would only detect these when they are moved between the shielded and transparent pool and so someone theoretically could keep these undetected in a shielded address?
Also, I think on GitHub there are discussions/proposals about auditing the shielded value - I vaguely recall something about detecting a balance exceeding the # of mined ZEC when moving between Sprout and Sapling but can’t seem to locate it.
On that note is there an easy way to see the value of ZEC in the transparent pool? It’s obviously available as it’s in transparent addresses - I’m just curious if there is a simple way to generate this number.
That’s a long way of saying I’m far from understanding this topic but when I do I will definitely write about it!