Electric Coin Company (ECC), the organization behind Zcash, a privacy coin, presented the official roadmap for the next three years, which pushed the price of Zcash from $147 to $189 – a growth of 28.6%.
Electric Coin Company revealed it will premiere an official ECC wallet in 2022 and that it will start to transition from PoW to PoS as it is more eco-friendly.
The company wants Zcash to play an important role in Web 3.0 in which the plan is for people to have complete control over their information so the ECC predicts that privacy will become essential for the next step.
Zcash is a privacy coin, like Monero, that uses cryptographic techniques to obscure identifying information such as addresses and transaction sums from third parties. The cryptographic technique is known as zero-knowledge proofs as it allows you to make a transaction without having to mention any details about it except for the fact that they are truly legitimate.
Monero only permits private transactions, but Zcash also permits public ones.
Zcash made its debut in October 2016, just two years after Monero, and it was based on the Bitcoin codebase. Just like Bitcoin, the max supply is set at 21 million coins. Now, Zcash registers a market cap of about $2.3 billion, while Monero has about $2 billion more.
Only a day after it was released, Zcash reached its ATH of $5,941 but it hasn’t been able to recover ever since despite a short period of reaching $880 in July 2018. The next years have been spent trading below $100. It was only in mid-February 2021 that Zcash grew past the $100 level again, registering $180 – it hasn’t fallen below $100 since then.
Using the wallet, the company will have the possibility of interacting directly with Zcash users, thus letting ECC to “rapidly roll out new features that may or may not require changes to the protocol.” The wallet’s code will be open-source and a software development kit will be released in the future.
The move from PoW to PoS will reduce the carbon footprint of Zcash. The ECC also hopes that this will reduce the downward price pressure on the coin. At the moment, the majority of miners have to liquidate their Zcash earnings as soon as they make them in order to pay for the high energy bills that result from PoW, but with PoS, that won’t be necessary anymore.
The roadmap also features interoperability – as the ECC will transition to PoS, new opportunities for cross-chain interoperability will appear.