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Zcash will follow the same emission rate as Bitcoin, with 21 Million ZEC ever to be produced and a halving every 4 years (840,000 Blocks), but unlike Bitcoin, Zcash will have a 10% founders' reward where the reward is only spendable as it is mined. This is significant because of the incentive it gives the founders' to maintain the health and usability of the currency. The founders will keep 20% of the 12.5 ZEC Block reward during the first 4 years of mining, which will leave 2.1 million ZEC in the hands of the developers and investors.
Unlike Bitcoin, however, Zcash will use an asymmetric memory-hard Proof of Work algorithm based on the generalized birthday problem. It relies on high RAM requirements to bottleneck the generation of proofs and making ASIC development unfeasible.
Zcash is due to be released in the end of 2016 and is currently in the Alpha stage. Users can keep up with the project progress through github milestones.
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