Zcash has successfully hard forked.  Coinbase reportedly is excited about the hard fork which occurred in July 16, 2020. Zcash have been very keen about implementing private Coinbase transactions ever since their launch. They succeeded in that mission with the Sapling hard fork.  The current upgrade makes it possible for miners to get their payouts in shielded transactions.  Good for miners.

Zcash miners will now be able to claim their mining rewards for processing transactions through Coinbase transactions.

Heartwood, the hard fork is supported by both the ECC and Zcash Foundation.  The upgrade consists of 2 improvements which were part of the Zcash Improvement Proposals (ZIP). The “Shielded Coinbase” and the “Flyclient.”

The Shielded Coinbase is ZIP 213.  The Flyclient is ZIP 221.  The Shielded Coinbase facilitates the much needed privacy solutions for Zcash ZEC mining.  The Flyclient provides support for the lightweight clients and verifies transactions.

Being a hardfork, the updates are backward incompatible and therefore all the nodes should synchronize with the new software if they need to use the Zcash blockchain.

Josh Cincinnati, Zcash Foundation Executive Director, expressed, “The Zcash Foundation is excited to support the Heartwood Zcash upgrade alongside the ECC, and thrilled that users will soon be able to connect to the Zcash network using Zebra, an alternate, consensus-compatible Zcash implementation built by the Foundation.”

The good thing is that Shielded addresses will mystify information like amount, addresses and the encrypted memo field.

Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert tweeted:  “ZCash (ZEC) miners will now need the full node to get complete privacy.  Full privacy for every wallet is a good thing.  Worth the upgrade.”

Multisig to Shielded Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash Foundation recently tweeted:  “Bringing multisig to shielded Zcash: Foundation researcher @chelseakomlo published a new version of FROST!”

The Multi Signature Wallet uses multiple signatures rather than using multiple keys to authorize the transactions. This is useful in avoiding the single point of failure and making it very difficult to compromise the security of the wallet.  The good thing is that the loss of a single seed will not lead to the loss of a wallet.  The “M” of “N” backup is the plus in this method.

A common example used to help understand the multi-signature accounts is where a husband and wife have a petty cash joint account and if one of them is not available for signature, it is easy to use the other signature to spend the funds. When more numbers of people are involved, it might need 2, 3, or more of signatures to make transactions possible, therefore called “m” of “n.”