Although it has been an exciting past two weeks of developments across all areas of the Bitcoin Private community, we have decided to focus this entire community update on a very important technical initiative that the BTCP development team is pursuing.

We are excited to announce that over the next several months we will be leading an effort to rebase all zk-SNARKs related consensus rules on top of the latest Bitcoin core node implementation. Upon completion, this will immediately upgrade the BTCP protocol and reference implementation with a number of important core blockchain related upgrades and provide a solid foundation upon which to build future features.

Currently, Bitcoin Private is formed primarily on the Zcash codebase, which itself is a snapshot of Bitcoin dating to mid-2015. Most zk protocol coins all rely on this same code, which is now missing roughly 3 years of blockchain upgrades that have been integrated into Bitcoin. Based on the structure of Zcash, and due to a 3 year code divergence, integrating blockchain upgrades from Bitcoin core into any zk protocol coin has become increasingly cumbersome.

In the last few weeks, the BTCP developers have explored the feasibility of a complete rebasing of Bitcoin Private. We’re now more confident that this is an achievable goal and are targeting the release of a working node in Q3/Q4 2018.

This release will coincide with activation of full SegWit support, giving the BTCP more scale both on chain as well as enabling off-chain protocols such as the lightning network and cross-chain swaps. Additionally, it will bring another 3 years of upgrades to the core node including stability and speed improvements as well as a number of usability enhancements to the reference wallet including support for hierarchical deterministic wallets (for shielded and transparent addresses) and wallet encryption. This rebase will also allow for facile merging of upstream changes from Bitcoin core in the future.

We believe this is a very strong step forward in establishing Bitcoin Private as a leader among the privacy blockchain initiatives that exist in the greater crypto ecosystem. Upon full implementation, this will greatly enhance the technology of any zk protocol coin that chooses to incorporate it.

We’re doing this because we believe that solid, scalable, and easy to use blockchain infrastructure is just as important as, and complementary to, provable privacy technology. Over the last several years, the Bitcoin core developers have made, and continue to make thoughtful blockchain infrastructure improvements which haven’t made their way into the zk coin world. Indeed, the Bitcoin development team are consistently trailblazing in cryptocurrency with regards to making peer to peer electronic cash transactions more efficient and optimized in nature. We’re excited to integrate these innovations and even more excited that we’re moving to a place where integration of future blockchain technology upgrades can be as seamless as possible, especially relative to any other blockchains premised on zk-SNARKs.

Given that we are an open source, community driven project, we welcome developers of all other projects to provide feedback and even consider following suit to better benefit their respective communities. You can currently see our progress on the refactoring at the following repository: https://github.com/BTCPrivate/BTCP-Rebase