ZCash Developer Electric Coin Co. Releases SDK Supporting Mobile Shielded Wallets

On January 15 Electric Coin Co. (ECC), the for-profit company behind ZCash (ZEC) has released a suite of resources aimed at easier implementation of shielded ZCash mobile wallets. It is based on early 2019 tests conducted after the Sapling upgrade.

Electric Coin Co. released a set of Android and iOS Software Development Kits (SDK). The Android SDK was an updated 2019 version with support for the ZCash mainnet added, while iOS SDK was entirely new providing functionalities equal to that of Android SDK.

The release also included a back-end service for enabling Android and iOS devices connections to the ZCash blockchain for mobile wallets.

As the software is still under development, the company encouraged third-party developers to create and experiment with shielded wallets.

Past race for mobile shielded wallets

ZCash is a mixed chain, combining transparent and private transactions. In transparent mode transactions are processed similarly to Bitcoin (BTC) ones, while private (or shielded) transactions are fully encrypted.

First implementations of ZCash privacy methodology relied heavily on the hardware, requiring at least 2.9 Gb of RAM. Thus, mobile wallets were able to incorporate only transparent transactions.

After the Sapling upgrade which took place in October 2018, the memory requirements for private transfers went down significantly, which allowed for full-fledged mobile wallets. The ZCash reference wallet appeared six months later in 2019, although it was compatible only with the testnet.