Accept Zcash at your business
Cash without the surveillance state. Imagine that.
This page is for the cafés, food vendors, laundries, barbers, and online shops at Network School (and anyone else who wants to take Zcash). The Zcash Network School grant covers free onboarding, a 15- minute setup gets you accepting shielded ZEC.
Why bother
Section titled “Why bother”- Customers at NS will arrive with ZEC. That’s part of the program. If you accept it, you’ll have customers your competitor won’t.
- No chargebacks. Crypto payments are final once confirmed. The ~1% you used to lose to chargeback fraud stays in your pocket.
- Near-zero fees. Card networks take 1.5–3.5%. Zcash fees are fractions of a cent. On thin-margin businesses that’s the difference between viable and not.
- Private by default. Your sales aren’t public. Your customers’ payments aren’t public. Your competitors can’t shadow your revenue.
You can convert ZEC to fiat any time you want via an exchange. Holding ZEC on the balance sheet is a choice, not a requirement.
Pick a path
Section titled “Pick a path”Option A: In-person POS (cafés, food, retail, service)
Section titled “Option A: In-person POS (cafés, food, retail, service)”This is what 90% of NS businesses should use. You have a phone. ZGo turns it into a terminal. No card reader to buy. No 30-day account review. Done in 15 minutes.
Option B: Online checkout (e-commerce, digital goods, services)
Section titled “Option B: Online checkout (e-commerce, digital goods, services)”If you sell online and already use Shopify or WooCommerce, this is the shortest path. CipherPay never holds your funds; it just provides the checkout UI and the order/invoice matching.
Option C: Self-hosted, multi-coin
Section titled “Option C: Self-hosted, multi-coin”If you already run your own infrastructure and want zero third-party trust, BTCPay with the Zcash plugin is the right choice.
Want the deep dive?
Section titled “Want the deep dive?”The full curriculum lesson covers memo-as-invoice-ID patterns, viewing keys for accounting, finality vs. chargebacks, and the multi-coin gateways (NOWPayments, CoinGate, Plisio).
Read /using/merchants for the long version →
Book your free setup
Section titled “Book your free setup”The ZNS grant funds free setup for any NS business. 15 minutes, in-person or over a call. You bring:
- The phone you want to use as a terminal (if doing in-person)
- Your business name and a rough sense of average ticket size
- A way to receive ZEC, if you don’t have a Zcash wallet yet, we’ll set that up first (takes 60 seconds →)
We’ll:
- Help you install and configure ZGo (or CipherPay, or BTCPay)
- Show you the payment flow end-to-end with a small test transaction
- Connect you with bookkeeping tools (viewing key pattern)
- Stick around for office hours so you can ask follow-up questions
Do I have to hold ZEC?
Section titled “Do I have to hold ZEC?”No. You can swap to fiat or stablecoin immediately via an exchange. We recommend running a daily or weekly swap rather than holding, unless you’ve decided to hold deliberately.
What about Malaysian tax?
Section titled “What about Malaysian tax?”You owe what you’d owe on a sale in any other currency. Your invoices and memo-tagged transaction records are the basis for your books. We can help set up a viewing-key feed for your bookkeeper, see Selective Disclosure.
What if a customer pays the wrong amount?
Section titled “What if a customer pays the wrong amount?”The transaction is final, but you can refund partially or fully by sending ZEC back. Same as cash, with a paper trail you control.
What if I lose my phone?
Section titled “What if I lose my phone?”You restore from your seed phrase on a new phone. The Zashi wallet behind ZGo is self-custody, your funds aren’t tied to the phone, just to the seed.