ZCash was launched in 2015 by a group of scientists who wanted to create a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, but better. This is a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, and offers anonymity with more security. It was initially called zerocoin, then zerocash and ultimately the name was finalised to be ZCash in 2016.
Zcash has a slightly different hashing algorithm and security protocols as compared to Bitcoin. It also verifies transactions more anonymously than Bitcoin, thereby providing more security for users. It can be mined on devices and computers. However, the best mining can be practised on dedicated systems called application-specific integrated circuits.
ZCash History and distribution
Zcash was launched on October 28, 2016 by Electric Coin Co., a private company founded by Zooko Wilcox. Zcash depends on a mathematical proof called a zk-SNARK to quickly and efficiently verify a transaction and add it to the blockchain anonymously.
After the Zcash launch, the engineering team released some upgrades termed as the “Sprout series.” The team also put forward plans for two core protocol upgrades known as Overwinter and Sapling.
In early 2019, the Company rebranded to the Electric Coin Co. to differentiate from Zcash the protocol and the Zcash Foundation. The community then began a several-month-long governance discussion regarding the continuation of the Founder’s Reward and the trademark.
Evolution in ZCash over the years
Since its fork in 2016, Zcash has continued to expand and iterate on its core features. There have also been some big improvements over the last couple of years. One of them is Halo, a “trustless recursive” version of ZKP. Then there is also the ZCash wallet, an open-source, shielded-first, fully functional wallet released in 2020. Followed by the Heartwood Network Upgrade activation, also in 2020, which added Shielded Coinbase and FlyClient support.
Not to mention an increase in institutional support and the first-ever Zcash halving.
Halo and Halo 2
Launched by ZCash in 2019, Halo is a new zk-SNARK that addresses the two major problems of scalability and trusted setups. Zcash was launched with a trusted setup.It creates a secret number, and a derivative of that number is used by the Zcash protocol. This number is then created in multiple parts by multiple actors. They all then need to destroy the “cryptographic toxic waste” without revealing what it was.
A trusted setup would have had to occur at each hard fork. However, if the waste is not destroyed or if the secret number is figured out it would lead to an integral flaw in the protocol. This flaw would even allow individual(s) that discovered it to create Zcash tokens arbitrarily without anyone’s knowledge.
Halo 2, announced in 2020, iterated on Halo by using PLONK, a novel z-SNARK, rather than “Sonic” to verify transactions. PLONK is more efficient than Sonic, and would better enable further scaling of Zcash as well as move it closer to being able to eliminate a trusted setup.
At its heart, PLONK is an instance of a proof that can verify itself, thereby allowing any amount of computational effort and data to produce a short proof that can be checked quickly.
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