Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, is gearing up for its first hardcore.
While this could spark an event that could spark a lot of controversy about the development of the network or about free coins, in reality the first hard fork of Zcash, dubbed "Overwinter", is about a very different topic. The cryptocurrency development team hopes to lay the groundwork for more significant upgrades to the existing network in the future.
While the update adds some new features, Zuko Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which develops the network, said, “The goal is to achieve network upgrade practices.”
So the development team kept the Zcash community thoroughly informed about the process, so "they know how to do it regularly from now on," Zuko continued.
Updates
Much of the energy from Zcash's developers is focused on the Overwinter update, which is slated for June, and is also preparing for the next challenging Zcash update called Sapling. This subsequent hard fork will bring about big changes, speeding up transactions on the network while maintaining the same level of privacy that cryptocurrency now provides.
Speaking about the names of the updates (the Zcash software phase is currently called “Sprout”), Wilcox said that it involves a smooth transition.
Hard forks have generated a lot of opinions, some of which have been received controversially, as they are a kind of governance mechanism that keeps users moving along with technical changes on the network. If the Zcash community survives its first hard fork, the Zcash developers believe they can continue to upgrade the network in this way.
Wilcox said. which he prefers to call the process "network update", explaining:
If I say “hard fork”, people immediately ask me what name the new coin will have and whether there will be an airdrop.
But according to Wilcox, this will not happen on the Zcash hard fork, as "people will get version 2.0" of Zcash with new features that will be available immediately. "
Overwinter Update
First of all, Overwinter adds the so-called replay protection on the Zcash network, as a result of which some users remaining in the old chain and sending transactions will not create duplicates of these transactions in the new chain.
According to Wilcox, this is more of a precaution than a necessary feature, as he does not expect any users to update software to the new system (although this may be an issue with future hard forks that introduce more controversial updates).
Thus, the feature that Wilcox has identified is the addition of a “transaction expiration,” a mechanism that invalidates transactions after an hour.
Although this may seem strange, it often happens that transactions get stuck and held in suspension because users do not pay a high enough commission to force miners to process the transaction and add it to the block.
Wilcox said about this:
Some people think this is a bad idea.
Those who oppose such a mechanism believe that this could lead to security problems, but Wilcox notes that this feature will save users from losing money if they accidentally send a transaction to the wrong blockchain.
Thus, this feature allows Zcash, a cryptocurrency that has been derived from bitcoin code, to differentiate further with the largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Another big change that Overwinter will make to the Zcash network will be related to the “signature verification performance”, and this will also lead to the further exclusion of Zcash from bitcoin.
According to Wilcox:
We have a bug that we inherited from bitcoin code where if you verify signatures with a number of UTXOs it takes too long; Overwinter fixes this.
Holy grail?
Apart from these well-known upcoming hard forks, Zcash has other plans to address one of the most well-known cryptocurrency issues – scaling.
While the Zcash development team hasn't spoken publicly about its more experimental research, Wilcox has provided some insight into their work. For example, the team is keeping an eye on all the scaling ideas in the crypto space today, including Plasma and Shardings for Ethereum and work with Lightning Network for Bitcoin.
However, Wilcox isn't sure who will find the holy grail of scaling first. “Maybe it will be us,” he said, continuing to argue that Zcash could gain scalability by focusing on expanding its zk-snarks technology.
Zk-snarks, known as Zcash transaction anonymization technology, is also a promising blockchain data compression tool. But Wilcox is in no hurry to declare the readiness of the decision, arguing that even if it really works, it will take “years” to get benefits for users.
However, Wilcox came to the conclusion that Zcash is participating in this race:
We are conducting research to make sure that using zk-proofs can make a fully scalable blockchain.