What does the future hold for Zcash?
A Currency Needs to Be More Than Private
The asset is allegedly built with privacy in mind, offering more security for users than mainstream cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, bitcoin cash, Ethereum and Litecoin. The currency also has a fixed stash of roughly 21 million units and is trading higher than most altcoins. At press time, one unit of Zcash is just shy of $70 according to coinmarketcap.com, though this is down by roughly two percent.
The currency’s founder Zooko Wilcox recently shared his thoughts on the future of the coin. He admits that while Zcash has a lot of potential, progress has been very slow over the past few years:
In the two years, slightly more than two years, of [Zcash’s] existence, we haven’t added substantial changes outside of privacy.
This is something that will need to ultimately change if Zcash seeks a stronger audience. Privacy and security are very important elements of any asset or blockchain, but the product also needs to be scalable, and at the end of the day, usable. If Zcash cannot be used as a normal spending unit, it’s likely to encounter many of the same issues one has witnessed with bitcoin and other mainstream cryptocurrencies.
What, exactly, is needed for Zcash to become more mainstream? Well, scalability is a major issue. People need to be able to access the coin on a regular basis if it’s going to garner any traction in the crypto space. Wilcox comments:
I’m in favor of an ambitious scalability improvement. I think we need high scalability at layer one to reach the mission of empowering everyone with economic freedom and opportunity.
In this sense, Wilcox’s ideas align perfectly with what most cryptocurrencies were designed to do – to give users direct access to self-banking options and financial independence. Interestingly, Wilcox comments that he’s much more intrigued by scalable layer one than layer two. He says:
Even though I think layer two is cool and has a lot of potential, I think we also need a scalable layer one. So, that’s what I’m pushing for within my company and within the Zcash community.
He also says he eventually wants Zcash to be as programmable as Ethereum down the line:
Of course, the way we’d tend to do things is use zero-knowledge proof to make it so that execution of the smart contracts is private and off-chain.
Some Final Thoughts
Josh Cincinnati – executive director of the Zcash Foundation – also provided his thoughts. He was quick to bring up the Sapling project, which was a protocol upgrade that occurred in 2018. He states:
Sapling, I think, was the biggest improvement of the protocol to date. It was huge. It makes privacy much more accessible and opens up the door for mobile applications.