- Sapling brings a huge improvement to Zcash and Zcash fork that activates it
- Upgrade will help ZEC come closer to realizing their goal of widespread adoption
- Transaction time will be reduced to under a few seconds or less than one second
Zcash’s latest upgrade Sapling delivers the promise of being one of the most innovative, exciting, and groundbreaking advancements in the world of blockchain technology. Sapling brings a huge improvement to Zcash and Zcash fork that activates it and includes fundamental changes that improve efficiency, security and privacy for users.
Improved Efficiency to Generate zk-SNARKS
The Zcash team announced the much-awaited network upgrade on Sunday, October 28, 2018, had been activated at block height 419200. The upgrade brings improved efficiency for constructing zk-SNARKS, the Zero Knowledge Proofs that are required to perform the privacy functionality that set Zcash and forked projects apart.
The sapling activation occurred during the digital asset’s second birthday and the company believes this will help them come closer to realizing their goal of facilitating widespread adoption of “an open, permissionless and private payment system.” An official tweet said the upgrade was successful while a statement in an official blog post read in part:
“Sapling introduces new shielded addresses with significantly improved performance: a time reduction of 90% for constructing transactions, and a memory reduction of over 97%.”
The upgrade enabled zcash users with sapling addresses and even though the system is expected to take a little while before it can integrate the new addresses, the users will enjoy other tangible benefits that include ‘parameters generated by an improved ceremony and the BLS12-381 curve.’
Before the Sapling upgrade, it took even the fastest computer with the best memory and resources several minutes to create the Zero-Knowledge Proofs, the zk-SNARKS. The highly intensive occupation process also required a RAM of over 3GB to perform a single shielded transaction to generate the zk-SNARKS.
With the Sapling upgrade this time will be reduced to under a few seconds and in other cases less than one second. The speed improvement comes “at no cost to privacy,” and enables Zcash to complete privacy and anonymity at speeds equivalent to other making Zcash capable of complete privacy and anonymity at performance comparable to other transparent non-encrypted blockchains.
Initially Delayed
The Sapling upgrade Zcash 2.0.0 was expected far back in June but was delayed to July 1, 2018, before the company deciding to give it additional testing time so all stakeholders could participate and ensure its safe activation. ZEC stated then:
“We encourage all third parties to use release 1.1.2 to test Sapling. This release is scheduled for July 1, 2018, with support ending on October 21, 2018 […] the specific Block Height for the Sapling activation and parameters will be set with the release of version 2.0.0 on August 12th. Activation is anticipated to be October 28th, 2018 — Zcash’s second birthday!”
