In August, ECC shared its rationale for transferring Zcash from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. Whereas most of ECC is concentrated on the upcoming deployment of Halo and the shielded-by-default ecosystem within the impending NU5 replace, just a few of us have begun the preliminary analysis section with a aim of manufacturing a concrete transition proposal to the Zcash group.
This replace describes the key areas of analysis and open questions we’re investigating. In a subsequent put up, we’ll dive deeper into the continued technical analysis and our preferences.
Analysis areas
ECC’s proof-of-stake analysis focuses on key areas that instantly impression the protection, scalability, and ease of use for ZEC customers. The next is an inventory of areas we’re presently reviewing and our preferences inside every space.
Analysis areas:
- Shielded pockets UX & safety
- Our focus is on sustaining current shielded, cellular performance.
- We goal to allow shielded, cellular customers to simply delegate ZEC to earn staking rewards.
- Cross-chain interoperability
- We want protocols with finality over dynamic availability to allow safer interoperability throughout blockchains.
- Proof-of-stake safety
- We want protocols with finality over dynamic availability as a result of we imagine the financial ensures of the previous current higher trade-offs for customers.
- We want minimal out-of-band prices to run block choice infrastructure to decrease the fee for brand new validators to compete.
- Issuance fee
- We want an issuance fee strictly equal to or much less than the present Zcash issuance fee, which maintains the 21M ZEC provide cap, whereas probably having decrease issuance within the nearer time period.
- On-chain governance
- We want to allow customers to simply specific their preferences by coin weight in polls anybody can create.
- We want to not enshrine coin-weighted polling to be binding on the protocol or governance layers, and as an alternative to make use of this mechanism as a further supply of suggestions for governance.
- Decreasing protocol complexity
- We want to solely help newer shielded-transfer capabilities on the goal protocol, excluding t-addrs, Sprout, and Sapling switch protocols.
- We want to develop an everyday and constant retirement course of to allow Zcash protocol to repeatedly evolve with out accruing extreme complexity.
Our strategy:
- We want to depend on a protocol that demonstrates real-world deployment success.
- We want protocols with robust theoretical safety foundations.
- We want to make as few alterations to a protocol as attainable to help Zcash.
- We want to pick out a goal protocol previous to growing a transition plan.
Analysis targets
Our analysis, like all ECC efforts, are guided by our North Star: to ship a world-class consumer expertise for ZEC. This requires revolutionary wallets and consumer interfaces, ubiquitous business choices for utilizing ZEC, safety and security (encompassing every part from financial design to privateness to protocol and product safety to regulatory readability), steady innovation to evolve with the world, and group alignment round core values.
On condition that North Star, we have now 4 high-level targets for proof-of-stake product analysis:
- We goal to enhance ZEC’s place as a number one personal, world, permissionless cryptocurrency within the rising Web3 paradigm, in addition to extending its utility for the real-world financial system.
- We look at all design choices with a lens of usability and product-market match for current or potential merchandise that combine ZEC.
- If our proposal is to be adopted by the Zcash group, it should fulfill and encourage a considerable financial majority of present and potential future members.
- We goal to take care of ECC’s world-class requirements for designing and deploying secure, personal, resilient, permissionless protocol designs and implementations.
- We goal to pick out the perfect “minimal viable” goal protocol, primarily based on the idea that future enhancements could be made to the consensus protocol when needed.
Subsequent Steps
This analysis will in the end produce a proposal that recommends Zcash transfer to a proof-of-stake protocol. This proposal may change the broader use case for the ZEC forex and place its underlying applied sciences on the forefront of Web3.
To offer ZEC customers with as a lot info as attainable, we can be releasing a sequence of technical analysis blogs within the coming months. It will give group members an opportunity to supply suggestions and ask questions on our strategy, lengthy earlier than we start growing a particular proposal.
By releasing our analysis previous to a proposal, we hope Zcash group members perceive our imaginative and prescient for the ZEC forex, and why a change to proof-of-stake would profit ZEC’s utility. We imagine this variation will create a greater consumer expertise, extra utility, and extra adoption for ZEC, and sit up for suggestions from throughout the group.
