Bitcoin Private foundation has declared that they’ll be awarding a sequence of $15,000 grants to projects studying different aspects of cybersecurity and cryptography. The organization is searching for sponsors projects enduring anywhere from 3 months to 1 year, and the contributions will be disseminated on a regular basis.

This isn’t the first case that a cryptocurrency organization has provided research grants. Last January, the creator of Ethereum – Vitalik Buterin declared that the Ethereum Foundation would be sponsoring research into raising the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain. Vitalik claimed that network stability was probably the single most vital key technical challenge, which requires being fixed for blockchain applications to achieve mass adoption. The number of the subsidies provided by the Ethereum Foundation will be somewhere from 50,000 to 1 million US dollars.

BTCP or Bitcoin Private is a dual-blockchain of ZClassic and Bitcoin. The fork snapshot happened on 28^th of February at BTC block height 511,346 while the ZClassic block height was 272,991. Anyone acquiring either ZCL or BTC at those block heights can entitle BTCP at a ratio of 1:1 of both coins, assuming the coins are held in a wallet, which enables private key exportation. For instance, if a person acquired 1 BTC and 10 ZCL, he or she is qualified to claim 11 BTCP.

Given that ZCL is far less costly than Bitcoin Private, broadcast of the form suddenly raised the need for ZCL, as most investors wanted to exploit on the fork. This immediate boost in demand caused the price of ZKL to increase from $1.83 on December 1 to $188.97 by 20^th of February. Nonetheless, if the snapshot happened, the price of ZCL dropped significantly because of massive efforts.

BTC makes use of zk-SNARKs or also referred as zero-knowledge proofs to enable for shielded transactions in which users are kept completely anonymous, with no transaction balances or address showing on the blockchain. Further, these zero-knowledge proofs enable the rationality of transactions to be proven devoid of providing any information, which could be utilized to track either the receiver or the sender.

According to Edward Snowden, he claimed that zero-knowledge proofs might be the future of the private trade. Vitalik thinks the zk-SNARKs are a largely essential game-changing technology because they’re the most under-hyped thing available in the cryptography at present.

Zk-SNARKS were employed by the Zcash in 2016. They are a hard fork of ZCash that removed the 20 percent founder’s tax of the firm. BTC hopes to unite the widespread adoption and brand recognition along with privacy solutions of ZCL, basically bringing zk-SNARKS to every user of Bitcoin.

The probable research directions proposed by the BTC foundation consists of improving the security of lite users like Electrum, connecting the gap in usability between zk-SNARKS and bitcoin script, boosting the effectiveness of zk-SNARK generation and strengthening privacy on the peer-to-peer system.

While’s it’s quite early to create any predictions about BTC, it’s likely that an analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain raises, more cryptocurrency users will determine the essential value of zero-knowledge proofs that fuel extensive adoption of Bitcoin Private as the favored means of confidential transactions.