Electric Coin Company’s Zcash Cryptocurrency is Striving for ‘Ambitious’ Upgrades

Electronic Coin Company’s CEO Zooko Wilcox, who is also the mastermind behind cryptocurrency zcash, shared his vision for the latter during a conversation with RadicalxChange conference. He stated, “We’ve been working on zcash for about five years and I expect it will take five more before it reaches the level of flourishing that has been on our minds all day long.”

Zcash, which was launched in 2016, functions as a privacy-protecting digital currency that is “built on strong science.” According to the platform, the transaction data is posted to a public blockchain. But, dissimilar from other platforms, the transactions through Zcash remain utterly confidential, even when transactions are being verified. The verification process does not reveal the receiver, sender, or even the amount of the transaction. Further, if users want to select what to share, they can do so. The platform also allows for transparency during transactions so that other wallets and exchanges can be accommodated.

In October 2018, the platform issued an upgrade, called Sapling. According to John Cincinnati, Zcash Foundation’s executive director,

“Sapling I think was the biggest improvement of the protocol to date. It was huge. It makes privacy much more accessible and also opens up the door for mobile applications. This was a moonshot project by the Electric Coin Company and it succeeded.”

A project such as this one may continue to grow, based on Wilcox’s vision. He’s looking to another “three or four-year long moonshot project” to develop the platform in a manner that is not specific to privacy. Wilcox stated,

“I’m in favor of an ambitious scalability improvement. I think we need high scalability at layer one in order for us to reach the mission of empowering everyone with economic freedom and opportunity.”

He continued,

“Even though I think layer two is cool and has a lot of potential and potential uses, I think we also need a scalable layer one. So that’s what I’m pushing for within my company and within the zcash community.”

This is not the only proposal that is on the table. Another is to turn zcash into something programmable like ethereum. The process is not easy either – the proposals will be subject to community review and debate.

Cincinatti shared with CoinDesk that representatives from ECC and the ZCash Foundation will review the ZCash Improvement Proposal Process. He added,

“The metaphor is that I want us to exist in a two-of-two multi-signature governance model where the Electric Coin Company holds a key and the Foundation holds a key and where broader decisions about zcash really have to be mutually agreed upon by the Foundation and the Electric Coin Company,”

There are a number of proposals on the table, such as a those related to a Network Upgrade 3, which has already closed, and a new polling feature.

Developments are also occurring outside of the ZIP processes. The platform is working to activate two backward-incompatible changes through a hard fork, which will upgrade the entire system. The fork is has been nicknamed

“Blossom.”

According to the Zcash blog, there are a number of goals for this fork. These goals include a split founders reward and shorter block times,