[3][4] The algorithm was published in 2018 as RFC 8478, which also defines an associated media type "application/zstd", filename extension "zst", and HTTP content encoding "zstd".

[5] Zstandard was designed to give a compression ratio comparable to that of the DEFLATE algorithm (developed in 1991 and used in the original ZIP and gzip programs), but faster, especially for decompression.

Starting from version 1.3.2 (October 2017), zstd optionally implements very-long-range search and deduplication (--long, 128 MiB window) similar to rzip or lrzip.

The Linux kernel has included Zstandard since November 2017 (version 4.14) as a compression method for the btrfs and squashfs filesystems.

[22] In March 2018, Canonical tested[23] the use of zstd as a deb package compression method by default for the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

[33] A full implementation of the algorithm with an option to choose the compression level is used in the .NSZ/.XCZ[34] file formats developed by the homebrew community for the Nintendo Switch hybrid game console.

[36][37] In March 2024, Google Chrome version 123 (and Chromium-based browsers such as Brave or Microsoft Edge) added zstd support in the HTTP header Content-Encoding.