Zcash developers build a new version of the protocol with sharding support

     
The developer of Zcash, the Electric Coin Company (ECC), intends to implement radical changes to the architecture of this privacy-focused cryptocurrency.

The ambitious plans of the creators of the project imply that the network  will be able to handle "thousands or even millions of transactions per second." Для их реализации может потребоваться переход на совершенно новый блокчейн с поддержкой технологии шардинга.

Speaking at the Zcon1 conference in Split, Croatia on Saturday, ECC senior engineer Nathan Wilcox said:

“I think we should make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050 if we can.”

Scharding, better known as one of the solutions for the Ethereum network, is a mechanism for dividing data in the blockchain into more manageable parts, where nodes store only part of the data and rely on information from other nodes.

Zcash may need to switch to an entirely new blockchain, created from scratch. This was stated by ECC engineer Dayra Hopwood.

The developers hope to use the new blockchain to solve another big Zcash problem centered around a small volume of private transactions. Unlike the Monero network, private transactions are not activated by default in Zcash, and although recent upgrades have made them more accessible, their share does not exceed 2% of the total.

Hopwood believes that the new Zcash blockchain will not support transparent transactions by its nature.

Meanwhile, Nathan Wilcox mentioned that currently the activities of the ECC and the ZCash Foundation are funded by mining awards, but this practice will end in 2020.