Zcash’s NU5 upgrade is officially live

Zcash Network Upgrade 5 (NU5) has been activated on the mainnet of Zcash (ZEC). This is the most significant milestone for the project since it was launched in 2016. The privacy coin now allows transactions that are shielded by default, so users no longer have to opt in to hide payment details on the blockchain.

On May 31, Electric Coin Company, the developer behind Zcash, officially announced that the NU5 upgrade with the Halo Arc product suite has been activated on the mainnet at block 1687104.

The NU5 is Zcash’s first major upgrade since November 2020, which includes the launch of the Orchard shielded payment protocol and the Halo Arc product suite to eliminate reliance on complex setup. Accordingly, NU5 not only improves future scalability for the platform but more importantly builds more optimal directions to protect user privacy.

Regarding the Halo Arc, this is a tool invented and developed at Electric Coin with support from the Ethereum Foundation, which includes updates to Zcashd (Zcash’s consensus node software), an ECC wallet prototype, and an ECC wallet software development (SDK).

Perhaps the most notable change to the wallet software is an update to the protocol’s privacy settings. While users previously needed to opt-in to protect their transactions, the upgrade will now enable privacy-protected and shielded transactions by default.

Electric Coin also said that the use of the Halo system in the platform allows Zcash users to make private digital cash payments right on their mobile phones. This is made possible through a new address format called unified addressing, eliminating the need to combine multiple address types.

The highlight is that Filecoin (FIL) and the Ethereum Foundation have also used Halo, to scale the Filecoin distributed storage protocol and extend many new features to the EVM. The partnership also brought in $9 million in funding for scaling projects on Zcash.

Halo 2 also introduces PLONK, a new kind of z-SNARK (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge), to verify transactions more efficiently. Essentially, PLONK is an instance of a proof that can verify itself, “allowing any amount of computational effort and data to produce a short proof that can be checked quickly,” according to an ECC blog post.

Halo 2 is an open-source project that encourages community participation and contribution. However, as Zooko Wilcox, the creator of Zcash and founder and chief executive of ECC, pointed out, “While the Halo Zero-Knowledge Proof system is available to the world under a permissive (MIT) open-source license that allows anyone to do anything with it, the new Zcash shielded money protocol is not.”

Overall, the NU5 upgrade is an important step on Zcash’s journey to Proof-of-Stake as announced at the end of November 2021 by the project’s development team.

Despite existing as a “long-standing” privacy coin, Zcash has always received a certain amount of attention from large organizations, such as Digital Currency Group – the parent company of a leading cryptocurrency investment fund early Grayscale current. More interestingly, according to many recent reliable sources, “whistleblower” Edward Snowden was involved in the creation of Zcash.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

Join CoinCu Telegram to keep track of news: https://t.me/coincunews

Follow CoinCu Youtube Channel | Follow CoinCu Facebook page

Harold

CoinCu News