ZCash Cryptocurrency Will Have A New Blockchain

The Zcash creators are developing a very ambitious upgrade plan, according to which the coin will be able to handle 'millions of transactions per second'.

Nathan Wilcox, the ECC chief engineer, shared his forecast for the future of the coin with the audience at the Zcon1 conference in Croatia on the 29th of June. Wilcox assumes that Zcash will be able to serve 10 billion users by 2050.

Deep changes in the blockchain and adding support for sharding will be required for such a great update.

Sharding is a mechanism that allows to divide common databases in the blockchain into separate blocks, and after that to distribute them to different servers (shards). At the same time, nodes (computers, connected to one blockchain network) save only a part of the data, relying on data from other nodes. Such a system is known as one of the solutions for the Ethereum network.

The Zcash and Ethereum roadmaps have many similar milestones, however, in order to use sharding, the ECC coin will need a new blockchain, created from scratch. It was reported by Daira Hopwood, the company's engineer.

Hopwood believes that a new design, which is being elaborated in the company, can turn into 'a completely new protocol and blockchain'. In this case, you will need to transfer the ZEC cryptocurrency to a new chain. The main difficulty is to make it so that the coin can preserve its value and won't get to the red zone. However, at the time of writing this article, the ZEC rate has decreased by 2.5%.

Moreover, developers are planning to solve the problem of low use of private transactions, using the new blockchain. On the other hand, Hopwood thinks that the new network will be incompatible with them.

We remind the Parity Technologies company released an alternative client for Zcash, called Zebra, the previous month. Its main task is to increase the cryptocurrency network security. Moreover, developers will be able to identify and fix bugs and defects in consensus quickly with its help. Today, the Zcash Foundation is responsible for development and support of the Zebra client.