Zcash 2.0.0 Release Promises Big Changes To Shielded Transactions

The team behind Zcash (ZEC) has released the ‘first Sapling-compatible version’ of Zcash node software on August 16. Zcash’s network upgrade, referred to as Zcash 2.0.0, offers considerable improvements in efficiency with regards to shielded transactions.

The team has plans to provide necessary changes for exchanges and vendors to adopt Zcash shielded addresses.

As far as mainnet release is concerned, the Zcash team has explained that Zcash 2.0.0 will not face any consensus-incompatibility with the sapling network upgrade. The upgrade is advised to all the users and miners of Zcash. Notably, the first Sapling block is expected to be mined at a height of 419200 on October 28, 2018, which is eventually the second anniversary of Zcash’s launch.

The Testnet release of the Zcash node software is expected to have the Sapling activated at block 280000. This occurrence is anticipated to happen in roughly a week’s time after the release.

The Sapling was earlier activated on Testnet. However, as the changes affected the consensus rules, the Zcash team has explained that the user’s nodes will on its own cut back to the Overwinter Testnet branch. This process would continue until the reactivation of Sapling at the new height.

The Zcash team has affirmed that the Sapling RPC functionality exclusively consists of experimental support. In case, the developers opt to use the functionality, they would have to state the tags –‘experimentalfeatures’ and ‘-developersapling’ to the prevailing functionality on the Testnet shortly after activation. As an alternative, developers can use the preferred features in the regtest mode.

A technique known as peer banning was developed to minimize the difficulty against a bunch of Denial of Service [DoS] attacks from nodes. The Zcash development team stated that the act was performed while enabling Overwinter activation. The peer banning was necessary because the nodes that were syncing from a block height preexisting the activation height underwent slow syncing.