Zcash
Zcash main focus is to provide payment services with the highest level of security and anonymity. By using advanced cryptography they provide much better privacy for its users than other cryptocurrencies. The founder and CEO of Zcash Company is Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn.
Zcash is currently preparing for upcoming forks, which will be first such big updates on the network since its creation. The CEO of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which develops the network said that “The purpose of this is to get practice doing network upgrades.” Such forks are inevitable with any project, and by looking at Bitcoin cases, they might be quite problematic, not necessarily from the technical point of view, but rather when it comes to the community and decision making.
Overwinter, which is the name of this fork, adds a replay protection to Zcash, which means that the users who decide to stay on the old chain, won’t interfere with the transactions on the new chain. However, there are no users expected to stay on the old chain, as the community is rather supportive in that case. Another interesting feature is the addition of “transaction expiry”, which will make transactions expire after an hour. This will help with the transactions, which were stuck in the chain, or the user hasn’t paid suitable fee.
Another issue, similar to almost every cryptocurrency project, is the scaling. Wilcox, said that they are “researching to see if using zk-proofs can make a fully scalable blockchain.”
Power of Tau
With the preparation to the upcoming forks, Zcash with its developers and the community have completed a “Power of Tau” ceremony. Almost 90 people participated in the ceremony, each of them have used their own unique methods to generate the cryptographic random code waste, which was needed to increase the security of the protocol. This seemingly weird action prevents potential hackers and malicious users from attacking the protocol or creating counterfeit tokens.