Zcash Has Activated Overwinter, The First ZEC Hard Fork

One of the top privacy-centric cryptocurrencies, Zcash, has successfully activated Overwinter which is its first hard fork. The network upgrade went live at the block 347,500 which was mined this Tuesday, June 26th at approximately 1:37 UTC.

According to many media experts, Overwinter will be a solution that introduces several performance enhancements to the Zcash protocol. One of them is the “transaction expiry” which is an upgrade that allows the mempool to automatically cancel the ZEC transactions that have not been added to a block within a period of 20 blocks (approx.
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50 minutes).

The features that will prepare the Zcash network for future hard forks are also important – including the highly-anticipated Sapling upgrade which is scheduled to go live this October. As developers say, this form will increase the transaction efficiency and scalability, especially for the transactions that are made from privacy-enhancing “shielded addresses”.

Overwinter is Here!! pic.twitter.com/yFm72tFDTK

— mine Zcash ᙇ🛡️ (@mineZcash) June 26, 2018

Zcash even proposed a two-year roadmap following Overwinter’s successful activation – where the network will devote resources to its developers and marketing research team, eventually integrating a “privacy-by-default” approach into the ZEC protocol.

The subsequent upgrades could coax more users into adopting Zcash’s privacy-centric features which are now used in a small minority of transactions on the network. However, this model could also cause the cryptocurrency to incur more scorn from the regulative bodies and law enforcement officials which don’t like the idea of privacy-preserving coins like Zcash and Monero.