While the upgrade is a significant step forward for the privacy coin, investors appear to be unimpressed, as the coin's price has remained relatively unchanged in the last 24 hours. According to the source data, Zcash is currently trading at USD 93.32 at 2:38 IST, unchanged from the previous day. It has dropped about 8 percent in the last week and 30 percent in the last month.
Meanwhile, Zooko Wilcox, the founder, and CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC) and the creator of Zcash announced today that the Network Upgrade 5 (NU5) was enabled on the network on Tuesday at a block height of 1,687,104.
The NU5 contains the debut of the Orchard shielded payment protocol, which uses the Halo proving system to eliminate reliance on complex setup "ceremonies," also known as verified setups, for the first time since November 2020.
In a blog post, the ECC explained that when Zcash was launched in 2016, its "A formulation mechanism was required for zero-knowledge protocols in order to offer public attributes that allowed users to create and approve private operations," which was known as the Ceremony. However, dependency on these so-called rituals or trusted setups would be erased with the current upgrade.
"According to the ECC, "for the first time, the efficiencies embedded into this upgrade enable confidential and secure digital currency payments on smartphones”. "Halo paves the path for more collaboration by building a platform that can unlock private cross-chain evidence at scale," the company adds.
The NU5 also has auto-shielding, which is a useful feature. Previously, users had to choose whether or not to shield their transactions, but now any ZEC sent to a unified address will be automatically routed to the most recent shielded pool.
Zcash is a code branch of the Bitcoin system that provides greater anonymity through the use of zero-knowledge proofs, a type of encryption. With a market capitalization of approximately USD 1.3 billion, Zcash is the 44th largest crypto asset and the second-largest privacy coin.
