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Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox is now proposing to move his privacy-focused cryptocurrency from having a very large carbon footprint to a more eco-friendly approach which is Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. “The benefits of PoS outweigh the drawbacks,” commented Electric Coin Company, the firm behind the Zcash. The second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum is already underway this transition, which some believe this will make Ether more attractive to institutional investors after the recent concerns around Bitcoins’ energy usage were raised by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Besides being energy-intensive, Wilcox believes PoW has “some security flaws” as well, as seen with the 51% attacks. “I think proof-of-stake can provide a much more powerful kind of security and at lower cost,” he told Forbes. According to him, under PoW setups, users don't have much of an option if the network gets attacked while on a PoS network, bad actors can be identified and their tokens revoked. He is also ready to move forward because Proof-of-stake is ”proven” and is no longer experimental, as can be seen with the successful launch of Tezos (XTZ), Algorand (ALGO), Cosmos (ATOM), and Cardano (ADA). Additionally, we are entering an inflection point when it comes to protecting our privacy, he said.
“We're both simultaneously seeing mega corporations and governments seizing more and more control over everyone, both in the east and the west...And we're simultaneously seeing people worldwide becoming more aware and valuing their privacy more, their autonomy, their human relationships.”
The close cousin of Bitcoin, Zcash, is focused on privacy which was “the main value proposition” of “basically 100% of all the early bitcoiners, including Satoshi and Hal (Finey) and Nick (Szabo) and Adam (Back),” said Wilcox. He proposed integrating zk-snarks on top of Bitcoin in 2012 and founded Zcash in October 2016. While Bitcoin is currently trading around $38,600, down 40.6% from its nearly $65,000 all-time high in mid-April, Zcash is at $113.35, down a whopping 96.4% from its peak of $3,192 from almost 5 years back, as per CoinGecko. And this switching to a “more decentralized, attack- and capture-resistant, and egalitarian” network, is also expected to “eliminate the downward pressure” on ZEC price, wrote Zooko in a blog post. Also, to turn ZEC holders into users by passively earning income by staking their coins or by actively running validator nodes. This new narrative just might help ZEC pump for the first time since 2016. [deco-beg-single-coin-widget coin="ZEC"]