The Zcash price experienced a notable 12% increase reaching $395, driven by a new proposal from Shielded Labs to modernize its cost structure. This plan seeks to implement a dynamic fee market replacing the historic static model, better adapting to growing network activity and institutional interest.
The technical proposal details an innovative mechanism based on “comparables,” which calculates the median fee per action observed over the last 50 blocks. To avoid data linking and protect privacy, fees will be bucketed into powers of ten, making it difficult to track user information. Additionally, during times of high congestion or network stress, a temporary priority lane will open costing ten times the standard fee. This will allow urgent transactions to compete for block space without redesigning the entire existing complex protocol.
Historically, Zcash operated with a fixed fee that, while working effectively with low demand, eventually facilitated spam attacks known as “sandblasting.” These episodes congested wallets and the blockchain, demonstrating that fee rigidity breaks down when the token value increases significantly. Therefore, with the resurgence of institutional interest and the emergence of digital asset treasuries, the current status quo has become untenable. Developers argue that maintaining low and predictable fees is no longer viable facing new massive retail onboarding scenarios that raise costs.
Can this new model sustain privacy in the face of growing institutional demand?
The market reaction has been immediate and highly positive, with the asset beating gains across other major tokens in the last 24 hours. This rally suggests investors welcome a practical solution that avoids complex fork risks associated with EIP-1559 style mechanisms. Likewise, the ability to adjust operating costs based on mempool pressure could stabilize the internal economy of this cryptocurrency, ensuring legitimate users are not priced out by prohibitive prices during peaks of intense usage.
The rollout of this system is carefully designed to occur in phases, starting with off-chain monitoring before being implemented as policy. Thus, the community will initiate a crucial discussion on how the network should evolve over the next decade, always prioritizing privacy constraints intact. It is expected that, if approved, this simple consensus change will offer a robust and scalable solution, using mining difficulty as a long-term heuristic.
