In August, ECC shared its rationale for shifting 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, a number of of us have begun the preliminary analysis section with a purpose of manufacturing a concrete transition proposal to the Zcash group.
This replace describes the foremost areas of analysis and open questions we’re investigating. In a subsequent publish, we’ll dive deeper into the continuing technical analysis and our preferences.
Analysis areas
ECC’s proof-of-stake analysis focuses on key areas that immediately influence the security, 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 present shielded, cell performance.
- We intention to allow shielded, cell 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 consider 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 price
- We want an issuance price strictly equal to or much less than the present Zcash issuance price, 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 categorical 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 an extra supply of suggestions for governance.
- Lowering protocol complexity
- We want to solely assist newer shielded-transfer capabilities on the goal protocol, excluding t-addrs, Sprout, and Sapling switch protocols.
- We want to develop a daily and constant retirement course of to allow Zcash protocol to repeatedly evolve with out accruing extreme complexity.
Our method:
- 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 potential to assist Zcash.
- We want to pick a goal protocol previous to creating a transition plan.
Analysis objectives
Our analysis, like all ECC efforts, are guided by our North Star: to ship a world-class consumer expertise for ZEC. This requires progressive wallets and consumer interfaces, ubiquitous industrial choices for utilizing ZEC, safety and security (encompassing all the things 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 now have 4 high-level objectives for proof-of-stake product analysis:
- We intention to enhance ZEC’s place as a number one personal, international, permissionless cryptocurrency within the rising Web3 paradigm, in addition to extending its utility for the real-world financial system.
- We study all design choices with a lens of usability and product-market match for present or potential merchandise that combine ZEC.
- If our proposal is to be adopted by the Zcash group, it should fulfill and inspire a considerable financial majority of present and potential future members.
- We intention to keep up ECC’s world-class requirements for designing and deploying protected, personal, resilient, permissionless protocol designs and implementations.
- We intention to pick the very best “minimal viable” goal protocol, based mostly on the idea that future enhancements could be made to the consensus protocol when mandatory.
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 data as potential, we shall 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 method, lengthy earlier than we start creating a selected 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 consider this modification will create a greater consumer expertise, extra utility, and extra adoption for ZEC, and look ahead to suggestions from throughout the group.
