Zcash Announces “Heartwood” As Its Next Major Upgrade

The Electric Coin Company (ECC) which is translated as the organization standing behind Zcash recently announced its major upgrade for the cryptocurrency. Zcash announces “Heartwood” as the next big thing which aims to improve the interoperability through FlyClient support.

As we can see from the Zcash news and the official blog post, ECC also wants to allow miners to receive their mining rewards directly as a shielded transaction. The community chose the name “Heartwood” in order to address issues such as faster growth, adoption and expansion.

In this manner, “Heartwood” will include two Zcash Improvement Proposals (known as ZIPs) including the ZIP 221 (FlyClient) and ZIP 213 (Shielded Coinbase) with the activation date to be announced in the second quarter of 2020.

The selection of the two ZIPs was already made in June 2019 via the community forum. Ever since then, the Electric Coin Company has conducted a review of the security of Heartwood’s specifications and has been working with the Zcash Foundation and other parties to make sure that the consensus is on-par with the upgrade.

Zcash announces ZIP 221 which is known as FlyClient, as an upgrade that will enable greater blockchain interoperability and also promote light client use cases. This ZIP will make changes to the Zcash block header format and would enable a more efficient way of working for all light clients – as well as help in the adoption of the FlyClient protocol.

The second improvement, ZIP 213, is also known as “Shielded Coinbase” and will affect the transfer of the block reward to the miners’ wallets. Currently, the Zcash miners can only send the rewards to a transparent address because before the Sapling upgrade, creating such shielded transaction required too much memory and CPU. In that manner, the latest altcoin news show that ZIP 213 gives a unique way for miners to send their block rewards to a shielded Sapling address.

“Shielded coinbase is an important milestone for Zcash network privacy and the overall size of the anonymity set. We anticipate that ZIP 213 will drive more demand for shielded support across the ecosystem,” the Electric Coin Company (ECC) and Zcash announced when describing this update.

Meanwhile, the price of Zcash (ZEC) on the markets is taking another hit, losing more than 6% today with the recent market-wide drop and currently trading at $30.11.