The Electric Coin Company (ECC), the developer of the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, is planning a network update to simplify the use of ZEC for payments and transfers. Zcash has always been appreciated by experts as the most anonymous and hardest to ever hack and track crpytocurrency available. However, this particular currency share the same old compromise as Bitcoin blockchain – low performance and scalability.
The launch of Zcash cryptocurrency took place in 2016 and the coin quickly became the second largest anonymous cryptocurrency. Today Zcash capitalization reaches $ 778 million.
“I think we should make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050, if we can,” said ECC chief engineer Nathan Wilcox at the Zcon1 conference.
The architecture and code base of the Zcash blockchain is very similar to Bitcoin. The developers also faced scaling problems, and are now planning to update the blockchain so that it can process hundreds of thousands or even millions of transactions per second.
For this purpose it is planned to use the “sharding” technology, that is, to divide the network into subnets and process transactions in these subnets independently. The technology will significantly increase the blockchain bandwidth and cope with a large number of transactions.
Interestingly, for the introduction of this technology, the Zcash network protocol is planned to be written from scratch. At the same time, the developers promise to make the transition to the new protocol transparent, so that users will not lose their coins.
Until now, sharding is found only in protocols of consensus based on the Proof of Stake (PoS), since the implementation of parallel chains contradicts the PoW model based on the choice of the longest chain. Thus, ZCash can become another cryptocurrency that has decided to abandon the traditional mining technique.
Recall that recently the company Parity Technologies announced the launch of the first alternative client for cryptocurrency Zcash, which was called Zebra.