On 17th June, Zebra was released by Parity. Zebra is an open source and is licensed under GPL v 3.0. It came in existence with the collaboration of the Zcash Foundation and Parity Technologies. Where did it get started? Well, the search of an alternative client to Zcashd by Zcash Foundation lead to this development. Parity joined in to collaborate in this project. Parity has given the Foundation an alternative to the electric Coin – Zcashd. And today we have the project’s initial implementation all set, well within (2 months in advance) the deadline.
As of now, Zcash Foundation has received the code base for developing the project. The collaboration has the best of both the worlds, with Parity offering its expertise in building blockchain clients and on the other hand, Zcash with its expertise in the cryptography industry and the ‘zero-knowledge proofs.’
Advertisement
To this, Parity’s Technologies CTO- Fredrik Harryson added that working on the project with Parity has brought great insights and expertise about how a Zcash client is created. In the statement, the company also hinted at its future project the ‘Polkadot bridge.’ The company also appreciated the fact that the project got quickly started and gave an effective alternative to. Harryson further added,
The community wins across the board, as there are now more core developers working on clients, with more interests represented and clients taking different approaches on how to build apps on top. Zcash can now boast a more diversified community that can effectively tailor experiences for Layer 2 developers as well as end-users.
The benefit of alternative client implementations is that it backs up the developers to instantly catch bugs that are related to implementation. If these bugs go unchecked, then they result in problems related to consensus. Therefore, the importance of alternative clients becomes stronger. Another advantage of having alternative client implementation is that the company can get more exposure to developers. This will result in more contribution to the platform. The Rust developers can easily start to contribute to the Zcash.
Advertisement
Zebra’s initial inspiration was Parity Bitcoin. With the help of Zebra, the users, miners, traders, developers can explore new ways to engage with the platform. If we look at the implementations catered by the Parity Technologies, then Zera is by far the fourth main public network.
