A recent report is suggesting that the Electric Coin Company (ECC) behind Zcash is planning a “complete blockchain rebuild”. This drastic measure is being taken in order to support a truly mind-boggling 10 billion users.

Zcash’s blockchain might need a complete rebuild

Specifically, this news comes from a fresh Decrypt report by Tim Copeland. His report reveals that the ECC is considering the most radical change to its Zcash product yet.

Zcash is currently the world’s second-largest “privacy coin”, trailing the premier privacy player Monero.

Nevertheless, Zcash – which was founded in 2016 and currently has a market cap of around $750 million – has loftier goals. According to the ECC’s Chief Engineer, Nathan Wilcox, Zcash’s goal is to serve a truly massive amount of people.

“I think we should make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050 if we can,” Wilcox noted during the recent Zcon1 conference in Croatia.

As such, the ECC is currently hard at work at trying to figure out how to do this. According to Copeland, many limitation issues currently plague Zcash’s blockchain. This is supposedly primarily due to limitations in Bitcoin’s code.

Zcash considers implementing sharding

However, Zcash developers reportedly want to enable “thousands, if not millions, of transactions per second” on the Zcash blockchain. Consequently, Zcash developers will need to radically rebuild the Zcash blockchain.

According to Copeland’s report and another from crypto news outlet Forklog, the ECC is considering to implement sharding. Sharding is a scalability solution that Ethereum developers have previously revealed they are looking to integrate into their own network. Copeland remarks that adopting sharding would not result in a new, unlike a chain split.

Nevertheless, the ECC product designer and engineer Daira Hopwood notes that in order to successfully achieve this, Zcash needs an entirely new blockchain. Hopwood reveals that the ECC is working on a complete rebuild of Zcash, which “may well be an entirely new protocol and blockchain”.

As such, a complete Zcash rebuild looks to be the most viable alternative for creating the desired future-proof blockchain. Nevertheless, some have already expressed skepticism over the solution.

The Adamant Capital analyst and Bitcoin commentator Tuur Demeester recently tweeted a harsh criticism of this alternative. Moreover, Demeester wrote that this is an admission “that [Zcash] was never scalable”. As such, it remains to see how the ECC continues Zcash’s development.