What makes Zcash so popular is their breakthrough shielded transactions. What makes Zcash unpopular is the computational power requirements. Most users & exchanges can’t support it.

Zcash has often been hailed as pioneers in privacy breakthroughs in the cryptocurrency realm due to these shielded transactions which run a kind of cryptography known as zk-snarks in which assist in obscuring transactional data. A recent upgrade, however, which is set to be activated on the 29th of October is being hailed as a vast improvement on the original protocol.

What is Sapling?

This upgrade has been called Sapling and the hard fork upgrade has been the sole focus for Zcash Company who have been responsible for the development of the cryptocurrency since launch back in 2016.

The technical changes that are included within Sapling will mean that wallets & exchanges will be more readily able to carry out shielded transactions and light & mobile wallets will also be able to receive these transactions which means that users will now have the ability to send anonymous transactions directly from mobile devices.

Nathan Wilcox, CTO of the Zcash Company had this to say about Sapling:

“The Sapling protocol will allow shielded transfers to be completed with about 100 times less memory and probably six or more times faster.”

This is quite the leap if you consider the fact that currently, one would need a full node in order to run shielded transactions. The Zcashc Company also hopes that this upgrade will help eliminate transparent transactions which on non-private zcash transactions which are sometimes damaging to zcash anonymity when used in conjunction with shielded transactions.

Wilcox said:

“We hope to see a migration toward shielded Sapling adoption, and as that migration continues we hope to transition to privacy-by-default when the time is right,” “All [Sapling] is doing improving the performance and the security. Who wouldn’t want that?”

Sapling Is Diversified & Light:

Wilcox describes the absence of the Sapling code changes within zcash as “too inefficient and too cumbersome,” and that the newfound ability wherein support for light clients will be a massive gain for the crypto community.

What are light clients you ask? Well, light clients don’t store full data from their blockchains but still have the peace of mind that comes with being secure. These clients are more commonly found to use mobile devices which do not have much storage or computing power as that of a laptop of desktop

Wilcox did, however, reveal that these clients won’t just appear during the activation day.”

This will require more dev work, if not coded correctly light clients could very well reveal transactional data to their wallet hosts. Wilcox described this as “dangerous” and also revealed that the Zcash Company is currently at work on a proof-of-concept Sapling wallet which will demonstrate how the code could one that is trustless.

Wilcox said:

“Our goal is to make a light wallet that has privacy protections even against a service provider. The goal is for us to design a whole [user experience] all around Sapling specifically and make sure that we can have the usability and the privacy work really well together.”

However, this wallet may not even be released to end users but instead, serve as a guide to third-party implementations by devs.

Sapling also has an additional feature which will encourage more shielded transactions. Dubbed as “diversified addresses” these will make it easier for exchanges to support more users who use this type of transaction. In layman’s terms, diversified addresses enable exchanges with the ability to issue multiple addresses for the same wallet.

This upgrade could bare many positive implications for privacy as wallets will be able to deploy the features so that users will be able to generate multiple addresses from one account, said Wilcox.

“It’s the same amount of work [as one wallet], but the exchange will be supporting a million users while doing that,” he explained.

Lastly, Sapling will also introduce a feature called a “viewing key” which can be used in order to reveal selective transactions. This will allow users to benefit from optional transparency in a way that bears less risk, said Wilcox.

Wilcox said:

“If we have a privacy-by-default chain and you want to have an account that’s public you can just publish the viewing key to the world,” “That’s the world we want to move to.”

Sapling Migration & A Turnstile Audit:

There will need to be a great degree of subtlety for the Sapling release though. To take full advantage of the upgrade, users will need to migrate their funds from the old version of zcash known as Sprout to a new Sapling address but this move will reveal the user’s funds.

This exposure of funds might come as a surprise to users, but Wilcox explained that it was done intentionally in what he has dubbed a “turnstile audit.”

“It’s actually done intentionally because there’s always the possibility that the Sprout ceremony was compromised,” said Wilcox.

Back in 2016 when zcash rolled out Sprout, it underwent a sort of ceremony known as a “trusted setup” where zk-snarks underlying the private blockchain were created. This move has since been critiqued by many to do attack vulnerabilities. The concern here is if the “trusted setup” was indeed compromised this would have opened the window for malicious users to print nonexistent tokens.

Due to this, the company will be running their turnstile audit during the Sapling migration process. Wilcox said:

“as sort of a check on that risk we want to do a sort of global audit to make sure that no counterfeiting has occurred.”

In order to achieve this goal, the Zcash Company has plans to release a migration tool and also is urging all users to be patient and to wait for the tool to be completed before migrating their funds. If all users make use of the tool in order to migrate their funds, overall privacy will be worlds better as the actions of all users will be merged into one flow.

However, this tool will not be ready for several months which means, for the time being, both Sprout & Sapling addresses will be remain supported by the Zcash protocol but sprout addresses will indeed be retired at some point in the future.

Wilcox went on to stress that the inevitable retirement will in no way impact any user funds. Users will no longer be able to receive transactions via Sprout addresses once retired, but if they wish to send outgoing transactions to Sapling addresses, they will have perfect functionality.

Users should note that this does not in any way mean that there will be two different networks running simultaneously. Users will still be required to upgrade their current software to Sapling and due to the superior code, Wilcox does not expect any problems to arise as a result.

Wilcox concluded on the matter by stating:

“It’s not scalability of the base protocol, but it allows exchanges and wallets and things of that nature to support many users more efficiently.”

Have you considered making use of Zcash before? Could this promised upgrade to transactional speeds sway you? Let us know your thoughts.

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