Electric Coin Company expressed that 4 years ago, Zcash launched with a novel approach to rewarding early investors and funding Zcash development through the “Founders Reward.” At Canopy activation, the Founders Reward comes to an end.

Canopy is the fifth major network upgrade for Zcash.  It is now coinciding with the first Zcash halving.  This is happening according to the Zcash Agreement.  Both Electric Coin Co. and the ZCash Foundation accept and acknowledge this.  Also, Canopy will be establishing a new development fund for the next four years.

With the Canopy, the miners will be getting 80% of the mining reward. The remaining 20% will be split between the new Major Grants Fund (8%), Electric Coin Co (7%), and the Zcash Foundation (5%).

The community has chosen the name “Canopy” for this network upgrade to evoke the themes related to collaboration and to ensure a vibrant and hospitable ecosystem for many participants.

For those who are not sure about how to upgrade, the ZCash Full Node and CLI User Guide provides for comprehensive sections with upgrading nodes. Most of the upgrade related questions are answered there.

For ASIC Miners, Since the Canopy does not alter the block headers, there is no specific upgrade action required on their part.

Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert tweeted:  “Zcash (ZEC) improvements with Canopy will be based on the five ZCash Improvement Proposals like ZIP 207, ZIP 214, ZIP 211, ZIP 212, and ZIP 215.”

Zcash Provides Wrapped ZEC

Zcash started off as an experimental privacy extension to Bitcoin.  To eventually improve on the privacy and fungibility capabilities of Bitcoin.

Wrapped as a joint-initiative began in July 2020 by Tokensoft and Anchorage to provide for greater interoperability between blockchains. Wrapped makes this possible by wrapping layer one blockchains and making use of 1:1 representations on the Ethereum blockchain.

Tokensoft manages to ensure the smart contract security of the minting, burning and distribution of the wrapped tokens.

Maker Dao publishes that The Wrapped Zcash token (WZEC) is an ERC20 standard token that represents a 1:1 value of WZEC to Zcash (ZEC) which is held in custody by Anchorage, which is a US-based trust. WZEC permits for Zcash to be used in traditional DeFi applications which accept Wrapped Zcash as collateral and in decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, Balancer, and Curve.

Though regulatory uncertainty keeps messing up with privacy coins, stuff like shielded withdrawals for Zcash is a very big win for everyone who support privacy in cryptocurrencies.