Zcash is the world’s first widespread cryptocurrency utilizing zk-SNARKS, a “zero knowledge” cryptography, that went live in October 2016, with the capability of verifying encrypted transactions without needing to know anything identifiable about the information in the transaction (such as amount, memo, etc).
2017 was an excellent year for Zcash as the protocol developed, matured, and the ecosystem expanded. The market-cap surpassed $1 Billion, and it is now well supported on various exchanges.
What is Sapling?
Sapling is the first major upgrade planned for the Zcash network (the first and current release being known as Sprout). According to Nathan Wilcox, CTO of the ZCash Company, the Sapling protocol would allow shielded transfers to be 100 smaller in size. At the same time, he mentioned that they would probably be six times faster.
Shielded transactions are computationally heavier to transact, validate, and record on a blockchain, rendering them difficult to support for “light” cryptocurrency users, like mobile users, and for exchanges.
?Dash vs bitcoin and Monero vs bitcoin shows you advantages and drawbacks of BTC
in comparison to most known privacy coins.
Sapling’s shielded transactions introduce new Sapling z-addresses for users which are shorter and will improve privacy for the entire Zcash network. Zcash states:
“Payments involving the new Sapling z-addresses can be constructed in as little as a few seconds and with only 40 megabytes of memory. Exchanges, mobile wallet providers, vendors and other 3rd parties will now be able to support shielded addresses.”
Price expectations
The past months zCash has continually been red, just like the rest of the market. I see Sapling as a major milestone and once live, it could draw a lot of attention to Zcash and price could see a nice bump out of it. It is not a bad idea to hold some ZEC these days.
