Zcash Heartwood Upgrade Enables Third Party Integrations & More

The privacy focused coin known as ZEC has implemented its new upgrade. We are talking about the Zcash Heartwood upgrade which now enables third party integrations and improved privacy through a shielded coinbase.

As you probably know from our Zcash news, the coin is the most recent iteration of the Zerocoin protocol. Developed in 2013, the cryptocurrency got a new protocol which was renamed to Zerocash and then rebranded again to Zcash in 2016. The original whitepaper for this project describes a  “full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees.”

Currently, the Zcash cryptocurrency achieves a high level of privacy by making it possible to shield the origin and destination of transactions. Also, ZEC is listed as having a market cap of $587 million and currently trades for around $59.17 with a 4% decline on the day. The value of the token, however, rose by around 10% in the last week alone.

What is notable to mention is the fact that the Zcash privacy model is based on ZK-SNARKs, or Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. This is an optional feature that ZEC has based on zero-knowledge proofs. In the Zcash blockchain, there is also an option for the sender and recipient address details to be shielded, which gives the cryptocurrency a major competitive advantage.

The Zcash Heartwood upgrade is big in the blockchain news, following three previous upgrades in the coin’s history. They include:

• the “Overwinter” hard fork which went live in 2008, enhancing the transaction efficiency and scalability for shielded addresses
• the “Sapling” fork which launched in October 2018, for similar purposes and reduced the zk-SNARK proving times from 37 seconds to 2.3 seconds, and
• the most recent upgrade named “Blossom” which went live in December 2019 and included shortening the target block times from 150 to 75 seconds, a new mempool size limit and discontinued backward compatibility with Sprout proofs for decreasing the attack surface on the ZEC Codebase.

The newest Zcash Heartwood upgrade includes two key network improvements:

• The first is called “Flyclient” and will enable more efficient proofs for light clients (interacting with blockchain in a secure and decentralized way)
• The second called “Shielded Coinbase” which defines modifications to the Zcash consensus rules which enable Coinbase funds to be mined to shielded Sapling addresses.