![]() Notable changes in the latest software release This week, the Zcash team released a new version of the full node software. The creators also revised the nomenclature convention, shifting from a theme-based to a number system, with the proposal going into effect then. Last May, Zcash activated ‘NU5', the sixth major upgrade, which moved Zcash to the Halo proving system. The Heartwood and Canopy upgrades came in 2020, the former in July and the latter in November. In December 2019, the project released ‘Blossom,' the third upgrade, which increased the maximum block size and reduced block times. The ‘Sapling' upgrade v2.0.0 followed in October, significantly improving transaction efficiency and reducing the size of zk-SNARK proofs, making shielded transactions more accessible and efficient. The first notable upgrade, ‘Overwinter' v1.1.0, shipped almost a dozen months later in June 2018, adding support for new features such as replay protection and versioning, as well as improvements to network security and performance. In 2017, the project saw a series of minor updates, including improvements to the wallet user interface (v1.0.11) and the consensus rules (v1.0.12) released in June 2017. The Zcash team initially launched the cryptocurrency with a “founders' reward” mechanism, which allocated a portion of newly mined ZEC to the project's creators for the first four years. Zcash has undergone several upgrades and changes over the years. ![]() This involved the creation of the Zcash Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the development and governance of the project. The Zcash community voted to transition the project from a centralized development structure to a more decentralized, community-driven model in March 2017. Zerocash, on the other hand, is a more recent protocol proposed in 2014 as an extension of Zerocoin and was later implemented in the cryptocurrency Zcash. The Zerocoin protocol was initially proposed in 2013 by researchers at Johns Hopkins University as a way to provide anonymous ‘shielded' transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Worth noting, Zcash was specifically forked from the Zerocoin protocol and then later implemented zk-SNARKs to improve upon its privacy and anonymity features. The zk-SNARK integration to the ZKP toolkit made it possible to veil transaction contents even on a public blockchain. Zcash was conceived to address these limitations using Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK), which allows for private transactions without the services of a trusted entity. However, the protocol had limitations and required users to trust a centralized setup. The Zerocoin protocol was designed to allow Bitcoin users to mint coins without transaction history – a feature that makes it untraceable. Zcash, an implementation of Zerocoin, was initially based on an open-source code mostly borrowing from Bitcoin at its launch in 2016. Electric Coin Company (ECC), the development team behind Zcash, announced the release of Zcashd version 5.5.0 late Thursday.
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