Zcash, in their weekly update, has mentioned the most significate of their announcements that have been made over the last week. Starting May 21st, 2018 Zcash announced the investment in Agoric, for providing an open, standards-based object-capability [OCAP] programming layer lined up to ECMAScript [Javascript] standards.
This enables the world’s estimated 20 million Javascript developers to built highly secure, decentralized, and robust applications [DApps] against the number of blockchains.
Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Zcash Company said:
This founding team are pioneers of some of the fundamental science of secure programming and distributed systems. And, some of them are my personal friends and mentors who have been among the biggest influences on my scientific career.”
This announcement comes after the investment done in StarkWave Industries on May 10th, 2018.
Agoric announcement was followed by the sapling MPC [Multi-party computation protocol]. Zcash’s transactions rely on ‘zk-SNARKs’ which is a small, fast to verify, zero-knowledge proofs of random statements. zk-SNARKs, in turn, relies on a set of public parameters that can be used to create and verify proofs for specific computations or “circuits”.
At any time if they change their construction, they will need to create new paraments, making it important for these paraments to be constructed securely in order to prevent counterfeiting. For this purpose, multi-party computation protocol [MCP] is being used to make the process transparent and secure.
On May 30th, 2018 Zcash announced the arrival of Zcash 1.1.1. The release is an Overwinter-compatible version of the Zcash node software. The first block of Overwinter is expected to be mined on the 25th of June 2018. The notable changes include ‘ZCASH-CLI’ Argument privacy, which is recommended to be used for sensitive information like the private keys.
Simon Liu of Zcash wrote:
Zcash 1.1.1 has arrived! This release is an Overwinter-compatible version of the Zcash node software, with initial support for Sapling consensus rules and a Sapling testnet activation height set to block 252500.”
The Overwinter network upgrade also includes a new feature called ‘Transaction Expiry’ which Zcash announced on May 31st, 2018. This feature makes it possible for the transactions in the mempool [Every new bitcoin transaction that is validated by the network will automatically be added to the mempool, where it awaits confirmations from miners] to automatically expire after a given number of blocks effectively timing out transactions that are unlikely to be mined and confirmed.
These transactions will persist in the memepool for 20 blocks (approximately 50 minutes), after which if it has not been mined, it will no longer be valid.
Justin Ehrenhofer, a Twitter user commented
Interesting! Will it be trivial to distinguish which transactions have an expiry date, and to know what these days are?”
Zcash currently stands at $256.03 with a rise of 6.94% over a period of 24 hours.