Maturing the Protocol
Sapling makes shielded payments fast enough for a phone. The company rebrands as the Electric Coin Company, Sean Bowe unveils the Halo breakthrough, and the original Founders' Reward gives way — after a bruising governance fight — to a new dev fund at the first halving.
Part of Zcash
5 moments in this segment.
- — October 2018 — the Sapling upgrade. Sapling activates at block 419,200, drastically improving shielded transactions: proof-generation memory drops from over 3 GB to about 40 MB and time falls from minutes to seconds, finally making private payments practical on a phone.
- — Watch — Zcash shielded transactions explained (ZecHub). A walkthrough of how shielded (z-address) transactions work versus transparent (t-address) ones — the dual model at the heart of Zcash and what zk-SNARKs actually hide.
- — February 2019 — the Electric Coin Company. The Zcash Company rebrands as the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the entity that continues to lead Zcash core development alongside the non-profit Zcash Foundation.
- — September 2019 — Sean Bowe announces Halo. ECC researcher Sean Bowe introduces Halo — the first practical recursive zero-knowledge proof composition without a trusted setup. It is a long-sought cryptography breakthrough that points the way to removing Zcash's dependence on the ceremony.
- — November 2020 — first halving ends the Founders' Reward. At Zcash's first halving, the Canopy upgrade ends the original "Founders' Reward" and replaces it — after the contentious ZIP 1014 vote — with a four-year dev fund: 80% of the block reward to miners, and 20% split among Zcash Community Grants, ECC, and the Zcash Foundation.
