Ethereum might just have found the perfect solution to its scaling problems via Zcash, according to its co-creator, Vitalik Buterin.

Announcing on Twitter, Buterin says that Ethereum is currently working on a plan that would facilitate an increase of ~3,200 percent in transactions. While previous models have been based on 2s (second layer technologies) such as Plasma and Raiden, the new solution would not be based on any of these whatsoever.

ZK-SNARKS to Help ETH Scale

Zcash is an increasingly growing cryptocurrency known for its privacy-centricity. Buterin revealed that the network could borrow implementations from Zcash and employ the model of the cryptocurrency to “mass-validate” subsequent transactions on the Ethereum blockchain network in the future.

ZK-SNARKS, Zcash’s unique technology provides an opportunity for the relay of nodes; ergo, computations could be verified without the need to execute them in the first place. Buterin explained in a post published on the company’s official blog:

“There are two classes of user: (i) transactor, and (ii) relayer. A relayer takes a set of operations from transactors, and combines them all into a transaction and makes a ZK-SNARK to prove the validity, and publishes the ZK-SNARK and the transaction data in a highly compressed form to the blockchain. A relayer gets rewarded for this by transaction fees from transactors.”

With the problems of scaling continuing to drag on, as more users join the Ethereum blockchain network, Vitalik Buterin believes the integration of the ZK-SNARKS technology would offer a more than significant boost as he estimated the adoption of technology helping Ethereum to process as high as 500 transactions every second. Given the current high is about 15 transactions, Zcash’s scaling technology offering an impressive rate that is 33 times the previous value is more than a welcomed addition.

ETH Scaling Issues with dApps

That the Ethereum network ran into a severe problem of congestion when CryptoKitties reached a daily user base of 14000 just goes to show how much improvements to Ethereum’s scaling is severely important.

If Ethereum must go mainstream, it must tackle its meagre scalability as decentralized applications (dApps) running on Ethereum blockchain network continue to struggle to receive widespread adoption. But with ZK-SNARKS, the problem would soon very much become a thing of the past.

Interestingly, Buterin is not the first developer to recommend the Ethereum’s adoption of Zcash-based technology to make the former’s protocol more robust. A group of researchers from both firms launched “Project Alchemy” in 2017, an initiative to add zero-knowledge proofs to Ethereum in order to make the protocol anonymous.