Friday, March 29, 2024

Latest ZCash upgrade to Make Private Transactions 100x Lighter and 6x Faster

Zcash ’s core differential, protected transactions are computationally so much heavy that most users and exchanges can not support it. Declared as a success of privacy in the crypto community, protected transactions run a type of cryptography called zk-snarks to obscure transaction data. But a new upgrade, predicted on October 29, is being described as a significant improvement in the utility of the protocol as a whole, but specifically for the use of these privacy-enabled transactions.

Doped sapling, the hard fork upgrade by Zcash, is the primary focus of the company, which is responsible for development on cryptocurrency since its launch in 2016.

Due to technical changes involved in the sapling, exchanges and wallets will be more easily able to accept protected transactions. Light and mobile wallet will also be a possibility – which means that users can send anonymous transactions directly from their mobile devices.

Six times faster transactions

While talking about the benefits, The CTO of the Zcash company Nathan Wilcox, told NationalTimes: “The sapling protocol will allow shielded transactions to complete almost 100 times less memory and maybe six or more times faster.”

This is a remarkable step. Presently, a shielded transaction is possible only for users running full nodes. And with the upgrade, the team of ZCash company hopes that ultimately transparent transactions can be removed, the non-private ZCash transactions that can be harmful to zcash anonymity when used together with shielded transactions.

After all, it will come in the era of “privacy-by-default” according to the developers.

“We expect to see an increase in the adoption of protected sapling adoption, and s that migration continues, we expect to transition to privacy-by-default when the time is right.”

Ability to support light clients

Wilcox said Zcash without Sapling code is “too inefficient and very upset but now the ability to support light clients will be huge for the cryptocurrency.”

Light clients are those who do not know all the data from Blockchain, these are usually clients working on mobile devices, which do not have much storage space or computing power in the form of laptops or desktop computers.

However, these customers will not appear “during activation day,” Wilcox said.

Instead, some development efforts will be required for this, for example, if not carefully coded, then light customers can reveal transaction information to its wallet host. Wilcox said that this can be very dangerous, so Zcash Company is working on a proof-of-concept sapling wallet that shows how the code can be trustworthy.

He said, “Our goal is to create a lightweight wallet with privacy protection even against service providers.” “The goal is to design a complete [user experience] around sapling for us and to ensure that we have utility and privacy work really well together.”

This wallet might not be released to end users, but instead, it only works as a guide for developers in third-party implementation.

Use of diversified addresses

Another feature of the sapling that will encourage more use of shielded transactions is so-called “diversified addresses” which makes it easy for exchanges to support more users utilizing the transaction type. Simply put, different addresses allow a single wallet.

In the future, the upgrade has got a positive effect on privacy, Wilcox said, because wallets can deploy the facility to allow users to generate multiple addresses for the same wallet.

“This is the same thing [as a wallet], but during this, the exchange will support a million users.”

In the end, the sapling will present a feature called a viewing key to selectively reveal transactions. According to Wilcox, which allows users to benefit from alternative transparency, but do so in a manner that comes with less inherent risk.

Wilcox said, “If we have a privacy-by-default series and you want an account that is public then you can only show it to the world, The world that we want to move forward.”

However, there is some subtlety associated with the release of the sapling.

In order to take advantage of the upgrade, users need to migrate money from the first version of the ZCash, which is called a dubbed Sprout in a new sapling address – a move that will reveal the user’s fund.

Turnstile audit

While the exposure of funds may be “surprising” to the users, Wilcox said, it was deliberate, which he called “turnstile audit”.

Wilcox said, “This is done deliberately because there is always the possibility that the sprawling ceremony was compromised.”

Upon taking back the step, when Zachash launched Sprout in 2016, it was taken in a function called “trusted Setup”, where zk-snarks were produced under their own private blockchain. The has been criticized for being sensitive to attacks. Worry is that if the ceremony was compromised, then it will allow users to print nonexistent zcash tokens.

Thus, the company is running this turnstile audit during the sapling migration. Wilcox said, “As a check on that risk, we want to make a global audit to ensure that there is no counterfeit incident.”

A new tool for migration from old system

For this goal, the Zcash company is issuing a migration tool and users are urging to wait until this tool is complete before migrating your money. If users migrate using the tool, then overall privacy will be better, because the functions of individual users are merged into one stream.

This tool will not be complete for several months, which means that for now, the Spelling and Sprout address will continue to be supported by the Zcash protocol.

Sprout addresses will be retired at some point in the future.

Nevertheless, Wilcox insisted that the final retirement will not affect the user’s funds. Once retired, users will no longer be able to receive transactions at the Sprout Address – but sending an external transaction to a Sapling address will work fully.

Even so, this does not mean that two different networks are running simultaneously. Users are still expected to upgrade their software to Sapling, and due to the superiority of the new code, Wilcox does not expect to be any problem here.

David Canellis
David has worked as a crypto/blockchain reporter for various media agencies before starting BlockToro. He loves old-school adventure games, techno, and the Beastie Boys. He is probably watching a StarCraft stream right now. To get in touch with David for news reports he published you can email him on David@nationaltimes.in or reach him out in social media linked below.

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