Core Upgrade

We are happy to announce that Zcoin is almost ready to be deployed on Bitcoin Core 0.13 and will be released soon. One of the benefits of being on a Bitcoin base means we can adopt benefits of Bitcoin improvements relatively easily.

Official GitHub: https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/tree/core_upgrade

The upgrade of the Bitcoin Core from 0.8 to 0.13 is a culmination of several months of work and improves on many aspects of Zcoin with node connection reliability and sync speeds drastically improved. Sections of the Zerocoin code had to be rewritten to accommodate the core upgrade and opens the door to a whole range of improvements that we can adopt from light wallets to hardware wallet integration.

Some other improvements from the core upgrade:

Support for blockchain pruning

TX malleability fixes

Memory usage optimizations

Privacy: Stream isolation for Tor: This release adds functionality to create a new circuit for every peer connection, when the software is used with Tor. The new option, -proxyrandomize , is on by default.

, is on by default. Hierarchical Deterministic Key Generation

The core upgrade also allows us to work on implementation of Znodes. We will post an update once we upload the code on Github and also have the binaries available.

MTP

We are very pleased that has been a lot of academic debate on MTP the first being Dinur & Nadler’s paper which we had patched a quick fix to it as a temporary solution. It was this paper that prompted us to launch our USD10,000 MTP Audit and USD2,500 MTP Implementation bounties to further encourage research into MTP and also prompted a slew of changes to our MTP code.

Since then, we have also been given a draft copy of research from Fabien Coelho at Zeronote Skunkworks that brings new memory hard PoW proposals to improve MTP and to counter known attacks to the scheme and is currently awaiting feedback from the authors of MTP.

We have also received on the 11 and 12th August several submissions from Marc Bevand to the MTP bounty which require further investigation and also further scrutiny into the proposed fixes. You can view his submissions here which are currently being validated.

Alex Biryukov (one of the authors of MTP) has mentioned in light of Dinur & Nadler’s paper, that MTP needs further work and we have been informed that they are planning to continue work on MTP in September and October which aims to address these new academic papers and research and to further improve on MTP including proof size optimizations.

As such, although we are technically ready to migrate MTP in its current form to mainnet, in light of the above discoveries, the responsible thing to do is to hold off on deployment on mainnet until the revised paper is out and there is confirmation that the attack vectors are closed as opposed a temporarily patched MTP that will be almost certainly be changed again. We apologize for the late notification but it was not a decision we took lightly but we are thankful that the research came to light before deployment of MTP on main net.

MTP in its current form is completely functional and continues to be able to be tested on our Testnet. You can compile zcoind from our Github mtptest branch and also mine with its inbuilt miner. You can also ask from our Slack if you need binaries to the MTP testnet or get some testnet ZCoins.

You can view our Testnet explorer here: http://testnet.zcoin.io:3001/

We remain committed to MTP as long as it remains a viable PoW and we continue to refine our code to make it easier for third parties to work and read with. We thank you for your patience and understanding especially when developing cutting edge technology.