Firm Behind Zcash to Introduce New Version of Protocol With Sharding

The Electric Coin Company (ECC), the firm behind second-biggest anoncoin zcash (ZEC), intends to build a new scalable zcash blockchain, cryptocurrency news outlet Forklog reports on June 22.

Per the report, chief engineer at ECC Nathan Wilcox said that the firm should “make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050” if it can. Still, Decrypt notes that achieving this would require zcash’s blockchain to be able to manage thousands — or millions — of transactions per second.

Forklog states that ECC is considering implementing sharding, a scalability solution that Ethereum devs also plan to integrate into that network in the near future.

Still, ECC engineer and product designer Daira Hopwood noted that, to obtain the desired features, ZEC would need a completely new blockchain.

The firm would ensure that coins would be transferred onto the new chain, resulting in a conservation of users’ wealth. The new chain would also process all transactions privately, in contrast with the current chain where under 2% of the transactions are anonymous.

Zcash — with a total network value of $744 million —  is the 24th largest coin by market capitalization. ZEC has seen its value decrease by over 0.40% over the last 24 hours, trading at $113.09 at press time, according to Coin360 data.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier this month, the nonprofit Zcash Foundation has partnered with blockchain company Parity Technologies to release a new, open source software client for zcash.

News broke last month that biggest privacy coin and zcash competitor, monero (XMR), plans to switch to a new proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm in October.