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, Original Author: William Foxley, Compiler: Alice, Jiang Xiaoyu, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

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01 About Zcash

Zcash is the first blockchain system to use zero-knowledge proof mechanism, which can provide complete payment confidentiality. Like Bitcoin, the total amount of Zcash tokens (ZEC) is also 21 million. The difference is that Zcash transactions will automatically hide the sender, receiver and amount of all transactions on the blockchain. Only those who have the viewing key can see the contents of the transaction. Users have full control, and they can choose to make viewing keys available to others. On July 19, 2019, Zcash successfully carried out a "friendly fork" at the block height of 570,000, and Ycash was forked.

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02 Background of friendly forks

Howard Loo, the founder of Ycash, is also a member of the Zcash development team. In April 2019, he posted on the Zcash community forum detailing the main motivations for the fork: 1. Rebuilding the goal of mining on commercial hardware, which seems to have been abandoned on the Zcash blockchain. 2. Fulfill the promise at the beginning of Zcash's creation: the founder's reward will never exceed 2.1 million.

In fact, with the development of the Zcash project, the "Founder's Reward" (20% of the mining rewards in the first four years distributed to founders, investors, employees and advisors) set by Zcash, which was born in 2016, will be released in November 2020. maturity. According to the plan, around November 2020, when the 570,000th block is dug out, the supply of Zcash will be halved, and the rewards for the founders will also be cancelled. Zcash will also face the dilemma of having no money to continue research and development. In this context, Howard Loo's new project Ycash soon received the full support of Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox after it was proposed, and tweeted that Ycash is a "friendly fork" of Zcash.

The concept of "friendly fork" was first proposed by Zooko Wilcox in 2017. After the fork, two chains are generated, but the community does not split, which is a friendly fork. “My hope is that, when the time is right, there will be a friendly fork of the Zcash community, deploying a different technology, fully adapted to different needs, but continuing to be tolerant and cooperative for the benefit of all,” Zooko said in a blog post.

At the same time, Zooko Wilcox said that he has nothing to do with Ycash personally, and the Zcash team has nothing to do with the Ycash team. Ycash is actually a similar product with almost the same code base as Zcash, and is a competitor of Zcash. The "friendly fork" mentioned by both parties means that Ycash has not had any disputes with the original chain Zcash, and has also been recognized by the original chain team. It is not the same as the "friendly fork" concept proposed by Zooko in 2017.

After the fork, Ycash has four main modifications:

1. Founder's Reward: Founder's Reward is reduced from 20% to 5%, and Ycash miners can always receive 95% of the income for mining.

2. Address distinction:

Transparent addresses start with "s1" instead of "t1".

Multisig addresses start with "s3" instead of "t3".

Shielded sprout addresses start with "yc" instead of "zc".

Shield sapling addresses start with "ys" instead of "zs".

3. Timelock coins will never be differentiated

4. Reduce transaction fees, the method is not limited to block expansion or unlimited block size

Here is the translation:

According to the voting results announced by the Zcash Foundation on January 30, the Zcash community has agreed to continue funding the development of the privacy coin ZEC led by ZCC (Electric Coin Company) and the Zcash Foundation.

The decision marks a two-month bailout for both organizations facing looming funding problems.

In order for ZCC and the Zcash Foundation to continue to develop Zcash, especially when the use of privacy coins is facing more and more strict scrutiny by international regulators (carbon chain value Note: Nordic digital asset exchange BitBay, in order to comply with international anti-money laundering standards, from 2020 From February 19, 2020, the privacy currency monero (XML) will no longer be allowed to be traded, and all users must withdraw all remaining XML before May 20, 2020.), this fund is like sending charcoal to continue to hire top R&D personnel.

For others, however, voting means breaking the original promise of Zcash that the Founders Reward was limited to 2.1 million ZEC (10% of the total ZEC supply). The result of the broken promise was Zcash's first "friendly fork" in July 2019 (Carbon chain value Note: The so-called friendly fork refers to a fork that has not disputed with the "original chain" and is also recognized by the original chain team .Different from the concept proposed by Zooko in 2017.) Bring a new product Ycash (Carbon chain value note: After the fork, Ycash will reduce the founder reward from 20% to 5%.).

It is worth noting that this vote also means raising funds for the public chain through miner taxes. Compared to other funding mechanisms such as ICOs, treasury bills, or external grants from third parties, innovation in Zcash depends on token performance.

Zcash co-founder and ECC CEO Zooko Wilcox asked for a new regular development fund, saying in an August Medium post: "I chose to withdraw from the initial development fund so that if Zcash succeeds in the future, and Once a community grows enough to support it, then that community will have to collectively decide what to do next."

Without further funding subsidies, the future development of the project is unclear.

The community report clearly shows that ECC cannot make ends meet, and in order to increase revenue, the previous developer returns have been adjusted. A source who asked not to be named told reporters that a poor financial record is not conducive to a company's community fundraising. "Advancing in good faith doesn't always create a good process," he said of the voting process.

If the current currency price is maintained at around $65 each, ECC expects to receive about $480,000 per month after the first halving of zcash in November 2020. (However, Zcash’s recent price performance has been disappointing: 2020 started the year with a drop, with prices down nearly 45% from early 2019, though prices have since doubled since Jan. 1.)

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03 Milestone year

The Zcash Developer Fund was established in 2016 for a period of 4 years and will expire in November 2020. Known as the "Founders Reward", 20% of block rewards are obtained from miners and distributed to Zcash founders and investors, providing some assistance for the continued development of the project.

The newly approved Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) 1014 will split 20% of mining rewards for development between miners and the general community fund, in a manner similar to the original Founders Reward. The 20% asset pool is divided into three categories: ECC 35%, Zcash Foundation 25%, and third-party developers 40%.

Voting was conducted by members of the Zcash Community Forum and a 72-member Community Advisory Group. Of the 112 eligible voters, 88 members cast ballots, with an overwhelming majority demanding continued funding.

Josh Cincinnati, executive director of the Zcash Foundation, told the press: “After a long and fruitful debate, I am delighted that the Zcash community has come together.”

Both the Zcash Foundation and ECC have accepted the community proposal, which is expected to come into effect when Zcash's fourth network upgrade ((NU4)) takes place in November 2020. (Carbon chain value note: In late August 2019, due to disputes between the Zcash development company ECC and the Zcash Foundation over the transfer of the Zcash trademark, the fourth network upgrade of Zcash, NU4, was postponed.)

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04 Why implement block subsidies?

“Zcash is one of the most technical public chains out there,” McKie said in a phone interview. “Zknowledge proofs require top-level math on top of low-level programming. If you want to produce a product, you might as well just buy the finished product.”

Zcash co-founder and cryptography expert Ian Miers echoed this sentiment, noting that decentralizing voting power and using it to distribute public goods is difficult: “The cryptocurrency community has learned a lot over the past four years, and it’s clear that One thing is, there needs to be some way to fund ongoing development."

Josh Swihart, head of the ECC, said the community's efforts represent a future example of democratic governance right. "Transferring power, delegating power is very difficult," Swihart said.

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05 Token politics

In addition to the Ycash fork, the foundation and ECC also have their own difficulties on the road of development.

Since no miners participated in the first round of voting, there will be no miners participating in the final vote. An email from Cincinnati stated that due to the lack of miner participation, the foundation still did not count miners in the second round of voting.

Trademark negotiations on Zcash (carbon chain value Note: Since late August 2019, ECC and the Zcash Foundation have been negotiating on the transfer of the Zcash trademark. The negotiations lasted for nearly three months, and Zcash agreed to donate the trademark to the Zcash Foundation. According to the agreement signed on November 6, the Zcash Foundation will be financially responsible for costs related to the distribution and protection of the trademark.) It also took longer than expected, a process that Wilcox called "emotionally painful."

Defining the constituency itself is difficult, as some believe "die-hard holders" of ZEC should participate as delegates.