Recently, CoinBeat reported on the fact that privacy-savvy Zcash was to implement a new upgrade by the name of “Sapling” which the company claimed would ensure that their shielded transactions would become 100x lighter and 6 x faster.

The privacy-centric company has completed the Sapling upgrade which they claim will greatly improve their transactions speeds and vastly reduce the size of the actual transactions.

This is in hopes that mobile transactions & other transactions become more prevalent, said Zcash, who hope to make these sorts of transactional activities common practice & more feasible on the network.

“introduces significant efficiency improvements for shielded transactions that will pave the way for broad mobile, exchange and vendor adoption of Zcash shielded addresses,” explained Zcash.

As most enthusiasts might already know, Zcash sports two kinds of transactions. The standard “t-type” transaction which basically works in the same way that most digital currencies do, utilising send & receiver information which are publicly available on a network at any given time of a transaction.

Then there are shielded transactions. These behave more closely to that of Monero & similar privacy-savvy currencies. It’s virtually impossible to glean information aside from transactional sums without the actual sender or receiver opting to reveal additional information. Where Sapling came in was to ensure that these private transactions become far more efficient.

They Did It. Zcash Shielded Transactions at 100 x Lighter & 6 x Faster

Proving many nay-sayers wrong, Zcash have successfully reduced their memory requirements for transactions by 40 megabytes thanks to the Sapling rollout. Take the fact that the hardware being used to create or authorize a transaction does not in any way need to be the same hardware that creates the proof. These updates, are of course, imperative in the implementation of a mobile network being built upon the Zcash network.

Another notable feature of the upgrade is the fact that transactional info can now be accessed without exposing the private key which is a key factor for users interested in mobile transactions as this means they won’t need to carry this information with them at all times.

Of course, this is great news for third-party devs who develop mobile applications & exchange software as they’ll now have the means to offer Zcash products with greater efficiency!

As we’ve reported previously, the hype surrounding the Sapling upgrade has been bubbling for months but at the same time the prices for ZEC have not seen an immediate spike, that being said this is no big surprise as many other currencies have been experiencing similar prices issues.

All Major Exchanges In Support Of Sapling:

In what is definitely more great news for Zcash and their consumers, is the fact that every exchange currently listing ZEC has supported the upgrade which of course means that withdrawals of a private nature will become far more feasible.

Yes, the technology that is the backbone of Zcash still has years of work to go through before private transactions reach the same level of efficiency as that of public blockchain tokens but the Sapling upgrade is a giant leap in the right direction. This reduced resource requirement that comes as a result of the upgrade will also more than likely lead to a spike in adoption of the currency.

Zcash devs, as well as key spokespersons, also argue that future upgrades of their protocol could ultimately lead to the holy grail that is “privacy-by-default” within crypto transactions, something that even bigwigs like Bitcoin can only dream of at this stage.

Zcash’s efforts towards a private-centric transactional crypto world must be celebrated especially with regards to the fact that their work is especially important to enthusiasts who reside in regions where there is a clear danger when it comes to transactions but their ultimate dream of “privacy-by-default” is still worlds away.

Could the Sapling upgrade be the first major step towards a “privacy-by-default” crypto space? Let us know your thoughts.

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