Zcash developers announced the creation of a new version of the protocol with sharding support

The developer of Zcash, the Electric Coin Company (ECC), intends to make radical changes to the architecture of this cryptocurrency user-oriented privacy, reports the Decrypt publication.

The ambitious plans of the creators of the project provide that the network Zcash will be able to handle "thousands or even millions of transactions per second." To implement them, you may need to switch to a completely new blockchain with support for sharding technology.

Speaking at the Zcon1 conference in Split, Croatia on Saturday, ECC senior engineer Nathan Wilcox said:

"I think by 2050, ZCash should be able to serve 10 billion people."

Nathan Wilcox, Electric Coin Company

Scharding, better known as one of the solutions for the Ethereum network, is a mechanism for dividing data in the blockchain into more manageable parts, in which the nodes store only part of the data, relying on information from other nodes.

But, despite the fact that the Zcash roadmap has a number of similarities with Ethereum, in order to use sharding , this cryptocurrency may need to switch to a completely new blockchain, which will also need to be created from scratch. This was stated by ECC engineer Dayra Hopwood.

According to her, the new design, which the developers are working on, may well turn out to be “a completely new protocol and blockchain.” Efforts will also be required to ensure that the ZEC coin is transferred to a new chain in such a way that it does not lose its value.

With the help of the new blockchain, developers are also hoping to solve another big Zcash problem – too little use of private transactions. Unlike the Monero network, private transactions are not activated by default in Zcash, and although recent upgrades have made them more accessible, their share does not exceed 2% of the total today.

As Hopwood suggested, it is possible that the new Zcash blockchain will be incompatible with transparent transactions in principle.

Meanwhile, Nathan Wilcox recalled that at the moment the activities of the ECC and the ZCash Foundation are funded by mining awards, but this practice will end in 2020. According to him, stable funding is a prerequisite for further development of the project, but he did not disclose details of how this mechanism will work in the future.

Earlier, in June, the first alternative client for cryptocurrency Zcash was introduced by the leading developer of solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem, Parity Technologies.

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