Exploring Mining Pool Rewards in Zcash at a Deeper Level

Zcash has attracted the attention of numerous users, including large mining pools, due to its excellent privacy protection and anonymity. The analysis of Zcash mining ecosystem contributes to understanding the evolution trend of cryptocurrency, evaluating system stability, and optimizing network governance. However, limited by the pseudonym mechanism and shielded pool of Zcash, there is little research on Zcash mining. Existing analysis of blockchain mining is limited to Bitcoin and Ethereum, where their methods are useless on Zcash with its enhanced privacy protection. To solve the above problems, this paper uses the block data of Zcash to construct a data set and conducts macro data analysis from a pool level. With the mining pool data publicly as the seed data, we proposed new ideas for exploring mining pool reward transactions from 3 dimensions: active miners, large output transactions, and deshielded value, and found some highly suspicious pool reward distribution addresses. These results can assist in revealing the economic relationship between mining pools and miners at the level of pool participants. In addition, we re-filter the addresses we obtained using cross-comparison to further analysis. Some off-chain public information verifies that our analysis method is effective.