Zcash (ZEC/USD) - a self-proclaimed anonymous cryptocurrency, has successfully upgraded to ‘Overwinter’ in what is the cryptocurrencies first hardfork. The split away occurred at the block 347,500 just like it was forecasted in a blog post by Zcash Marketing Director Josh Swihart.
Swihart notes that ‘Overwinter’ upgrade “marks the first Zcash implementation of a two-tiered governance model for protocol upgrades.”
The two-tiered model mentioned can be broken down into several sections:
Opt-in Upgrade
All nodes connected to the system will have an option to upgrade their node and adapt to the latest protocol rules. The idea is to eliminate confusion that other governance models are prone to which push users to a predestined direction, possibly without their consent.
Advocacy and Education:
This section is describing the new feature which will give node operators a chance to make well-educated decisions before executing any upgrades.
Just after the arrival of ‘Overwinter’, Zcash has published a proposed two-year roadmap on its website.
It highlights a set of deliverables, which were determined after the evaluation of the recommendations aimed at improving the usability, innovation, sustainability, and decentralization
Roadmap deliverables are:
- Reference User Wallet: “a reference implementation of a mobile wallet along with open source libraries”
- Privacy Adoption: Zcash will keep focusing on user privacy.
- Protocol Research and Development: Zcash will research scalability and programmability.
- Ongoing operations like Business Development, Marketing, Maintenance and Support will spread to a wider array of areas.
- Decentralization Support: Zcash will work with community and Zcash Foundation to support decentralization.
Swihart finalizes the roadmap with one last message: “This is the beginning of this conversation, not the end of it”
By Nadya Astam