Electric Coin Company September 2020 Newsletter

Gemini announces shielded withdrawals

Account holders at Gemini can now withdraw to a Zcash shielded address. This is a win for privacy and was approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The new capability enables confidential transactions that are safe and compliant with regulations and consumer protections, and it may pave the way for wider adoption of shielded addresses across the ecosystem.

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Halo 2 code released

In early September, Electric Coin Co. opened the source code for Halo 2, an updated, more efficient version of ECC’s recursive proof composition that eliminates the need for a trusted setup in Zcash. It may advance a promising scalability solution for Zcash and other blockchains.

ECC also announced it is committed to fully productizing Halo 2, with the intent to eliminate trusted setup as early as 2021. Ultimately, however, it will be the Zcash community that decides whether Halo 2 becomes part of Zcash.

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Recommitting to our mission

ECC’s mission is to empower people with economic freedom. This focus hasn’t changed significantly since Zcash launched in 2016, but we recently doubled-down on the charge. With the Zcash halving and Canopy activation on the horizon (November) this was a good time to restate our purpose and to recalibrate our strategy; and to celebrate this moment, we also launched a new electriccoin.co.

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A response to FATF recommendations

In July 2020, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an inter-governmental body that develops and promotes policies to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing and other crimes, floated the idea of expanding regulation to impose a de facto ban on peer-to-peer transactions by “mandating that transactions occur with the use of a VASP or financial institutions.” Our response to their set of recommendations includes the position: “We believe that the risk posed by peer-to-peer transactions is similar in nature to — but lower in magnitude than — the risk posed by cash transactions.”

Read the full response

ECC events calendar now available

Check out the new ECC events calendar for community calls, industry conferences, AMAs and educational webinars. In October, we have events every week, so don’t miss out!

Visit the calendar