It’s an exciting day! ZenCash partnered with Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), a leading Research and Development company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the unbanked, founded by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood. Charles Hoskinson is also the Co-Founder of Cardano (ADA) cryptocurrency.

The ZenCash and IOHK partnership will entail an exciting series of research and development projects focused on building a protocol-level decentralized treasury model and conducting a scalability study to ensure ZenCash scales properly.

The research projects will be lead by Prof. Roman Oliynykov, a cryptographer, IT researcher, and lecturer. Prof. Oliynykov’s team will handoff the prototypes and provide guidance to InfoPulse, a software engineering firm assisting the ZenCash engineering team with the implementation of the two research projects. InfoPulse is contracted directly with ZenCash. ZenCash production implementation date is not yet available.

A DAO for Fairness & Transparency

The first component of the IOHK research project is to implement a custom version of IOHK’s reference treasury model for efficient decentralized resource allocation and community-driven preference adoption in governance; this is consistent with the vision laid out in the ZenCash White Paper and supports Zen’s vision of decentralization.

Proactively Addressing a Big Problem in Crypto!

The second key component of the IOHK research project is a core protocol upgrade to the ZenCash blockchain to address one of the primary issues in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space: Scaling.

While ZenCash is currently appropriately scaled, the ZenCash team vision is to advance the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. One of the solutions being evaluated is Spectre, a protocol created by DAGlabs, as a next generation alternative to blockchain using Directed Acyclic Graphs with the promise of unlimited scalability and instant transactions. Pursuing a next-generation scaling solution is consistent with ZenCash’s usability mission, this major protocol upgrade enables high volume, rapid transactions across the network and therefore lays the infrastructure for radical usability. IOHK will evaluate multiple protocol options and provide a recommendation and specifications to ZenCash by Q2 2018.

ZenCash: A leader in Innovation

ZenCash is at the forefront of development, most recently releasing zen secure nodes on 12/15/17 and has over 5,500 nodes to date. Secure nodes represent an important benchmark in ZenCash’s goal to build the world’s most decentralized and resilient cryptocurrency architecture and censorship-resistant platform. The nodes run a full copy of the ZenCash blockchain, process transactions, and contain a valid SSL/TLS certificate, which authenticates the identity of users and grants permission to use encrypted communication.