When Vlad Zamfir, a researcher at Ethereum Foundation, asked on Twitter, if anyone could name two projects that would make the first blockchain merger, Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of ZCash, was quick to answer that he loves he loves the idea of merger between Ethereum and Zcash, which would eventually make 3 chains: the Original ZCash Blockchain, Original Ethereum Blockchain and lastly the new merged chain.

At Crypto 2018 @VitalikButerin used “ETH❤ZEC” as the hypothetical example, which pleased me. His conclusion was it won't happen because it would result in 3 chains, not 1. My conclusion is: that's fine! See also https://t.co/4gqoS0B3cJ — zooko (@zooko) September 23, 2018

Zooko also revealed that Vitalik wasn’t happy much happy with the idea. To that Vitalik replies, that it is not because its impossible but because it will be too complicated. He compares the merger to corporate merger times ten.

“Ethereum’s POS can be combined with sharding and use ZCash’s zk-SNARKS implementation to validate the transactions”, says Vitalik.

That said, a merger that's explicitly okay with 3 coins would be interesting. One idea would be for "Zcash Frontier Edition" to merge ETH and ZEC coin balances and combine ETH PoS + sharding with ZEC first-class snark integration, and then "Pure Zcash" could be more conservative. — Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 23, 2018

He then clarifies that he finds the idea of merging ZCash and Ethereum interesting. Vitalik also reveals how Ethereum will be merged with ZCash. According to Vitalik. Ethereum’s POS can be combined with sharding and use ZCash’s zk-SNARKS implementation to validate the transactions.

The Future

One of the biggest problems with this merger is what happens to the original chains and their tokens. Do they work side by side of the new chain or do they stop working and the user gets the merged tokens? Until the community comes to a consensus for the existing chains, a merger is unlikely to happen.

OK true, that would actually do it. Create a standard that all chains try to have difficulty bombs that blow up at similar times (eg. UNIX timestamps that are multiples of 2^k where each coin can select its own k but probably 30-34). — Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 23, 2018

As Ethereum’s difficulty bomb comes closer, developers are finding new ways to delay the difficulty bomb. One way to reduce the difficulty bomb was the implementation of EIP-1234, which reduces the mining reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH. Vitalik has openly stated that POS + Sharding is the next step for Ethereum to increase the performance of the blockchain.

Recently, Vitalik has openly a lot of fascination towards ZCash, calling it as one of the best blockchain projects, and finding ways to implement zk-SNARKs on Ethereum blockchain. He also posted on Ethereum research about how zk-SNARKs can scale Ethereum to 500 tx/sec.

Edit: Changed the title from Vitalik to Vitalik Buterin.

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