ECC:

Technical

News and notes about Electric Coin Company and its work on Zcash

Electric Coin Co. (ECC) has entered into an agreement with Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation, and the Ethereum Foundation to explore Halo R&D, including how the technology might be used in their respective ecosystems.

A successful transition to Proof of Stake would necessarily require support from Zcash users, a legitimate governance process, and a well designed technical migration process. This post outlines what the technical migration process might look like at the top level.

The 4.3.0 release included a change to prevent redundant getheaders P2P requests, to reduce node bandwidth usage. This behaviour could be disabled by setting the config option -nooptimize-getheaders.

zcashd can now be configured to optionally expose an HTTP server that acts as a Prometheus scrape endpoint. The server will respond to GET requests on any request path.

UAs make Zcash easier to use by removing the complexity of multiple address types. This simplifies the user experience — no more juggling addresses — and increases interoperability between shielded-only applications and transparent-only applications.

NU5 will move Zcash to the Halo proving system, representing the continual evolution of our zk-SNARK technology stack. Unified addresses introduce a future-proof address format that prioritizes shielded adoption.

Zcash Improvement Proposals (ZIPs) for Network Upgrade 5 (NU5), projected to be August 2021. ECC's proposals for inclusion of the ZIPs outlined here are subject to the outcome of security audits, the results of which will be published as soon as they’ve been completed and reviewed.

The latest release includes traffic improvements, a reworked library and other updates.

As the first implementation of Halo within Zcash, this would serve as a catalyst for Zcash user confidence and scalability, while making the protocol more attractive, faster and less expensive for others to build on.

The Halo 2 zero-knowledge proving system, invented and developed at Electric Coin Co. (ECC), eliminates the trusted setup, reducing the attack surface of the Zcash protocol and improving assurance about ZEC supply integrity.