Minters of ZCash cryptocurrency, Electronic Coin Company (ECC), has announced that they will build a new blockchain for the token. The new blockchain will be scalable enough for about 10 billion users till 2050.
Created in 2016 by a team led by Zooko Wilcox, ZCash was touted to be the next big thing due to the promises it brought on the table. However, despite being the second largest privacy-focused coin in terms of market cap, it has had several issues with scalability. In an official blog, it stated,
The ECC’s plan is to make crypto as anonymous and easy to use as cash—and, like most cryptocurrency companies, it wants to be the most widely used coin in the world. But since that means scaling its out-of-date technology to serve potentially billions of users, Zcash’s infrastructure could require massive changes that will result in the birth of a new blockchain.
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The move, however, has garnered a mixed reception from the community. Tuur Demeester, the founding partner of crypto investment firm Adamant Capital, tweeted that the announcement was horrible, as it implicitly accepts that ZCash was never scalable.
This sounds horrible to me:
– entirely new blockchain (new coin)
– implicit admission that $ZEC was never scalable, and that opt-in privacy doesn't work
– roadmap has "a lot of similarities with ETH"
– "sharding" panacea
– subsidy for ZEC foundation https://t.co/R5vLXtKOCP— Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) June 23, 2019
ZCash currently has a market cap of over $750 million, making it second only to Monero. The announcement was made by Nathan Wilcox, Chief Engineer at ECC, during the Zcon1 Conference in Split, Croatia. He stated,
I think we should make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050 if we can.
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The decision to cater over 10 billion people seems too ambitious, given the global population in total is around 8 billion, and only a micro-fraction of it uses cryptocurrencies. Instead of promises too big to fulfill, companies must focus on realistic and achievable targets. Moreover, future of privacy focus coins is uncertain, given the fact that global agencies like central banks, Financial Action Task Force (FATF), etc. are imposing heavy regulations to reduce anonymity in a bid to crackdown money laundering via crypto funds.
