The Logbook
Insights from the deep water.
Beginner Guide - Wallet
Published on September 1, 2026
Getting a shielded Zcash wallet running on Debian, for the first time.
Install It, or Build It Yourself
Zecboat is a desktop application for Debian. Download the signed package and run its installer. Or build it from source: install a handful of system libraries, fetch the source, wait for it to compile.
What you get is a wallet that holds shielded ZEC and shielded assets, with keys that never leave your machine.
One Guide, Kept Current
The full instructions live in one place so they cannot drift out of date, and they include the two steps most guides leave out.
The system library whose absence breaks the build with an error mentioning nothing relevant — and the proving parameters, without which the wallet looks perfectly healthy right up until you try to send something.
Before You Trust It With Anything
Whatever else you skim, do not skip the backup section. A Zecboat backup is two files, and either one alone is worthless.
The database holds your recovery phrase in encrypted form; a separate identity file is the key to it. Copy one without the other and you have no backup at all — and you will not discover that until the day it matters.
Restore It Once
Write the recovery phrase on paper as well, keep it off the machine, and restore it somewhere else before you trust it with anything.