The Electric Coin Co. (ECC) were developing the source code for Halo 2. The Halo 2 is a more updated version which eliminates the requirement for a trusted set up in ZCash. This is set to provide for a promising scalability solution for ZCash and several other blockchains.
Zooko of ZCash tweeted: “Today we are releasing the source code for Halo 2 in cooperation with the Ethereum Foundation, and committing to supporting Halo 2 in order to eliminate trusted setups. Whether this gets deployed in Zcash will ultimately be up to the Zcash community.”
ECC Engineer Sean Bowe has already provided a more in depth explanation for Halo 2. All of the improvements for Halo 2 were done in coordination with the Ethereum Foundation, who facilitated a grant in this regard.
The entire focus of ECC is to eliminate trusted setup on Zcash by 2021. Thus, creating a platform for support of recursive proofs of layer 1 scalability. They are set to provide more of R&D, engineering, business development, marketing, operations and third-party support to ensure Halo 2 being productized in a safe and secure manner.
Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert tweeted: “Back in July, EF granted $120,000 to ECC to continue Halo research and now Halo 2 is a reality and Zcash will benefit if they decide to use it.”
It is nice to see people and organizations from different blockchain ecosystems work together providing for efforts realizable by all.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum founder stated, “The Ethereum Foundation is excited to formally support the talented people at ECC, while taking our informal collaborations to date to the next level,” further stated, “The EF believes zero-knowledge proof technologies will be transformative toward building a better world and recognizes Halo 2’s potential to contribute to this.”
The ECC is in further discussions with EF and several other organizations to further Halo collaboration. They are set to use the same zero-knowledge proof technology (Halo 2) on multiple blockchain, which may enable trustless and flexible cross-chain interoperation.
The Halo 2 research are proceeding with next two milestones: “Publish a development branch using PLONK, including benchmarking for various circuit sizes. Develop a proof-of-concept, proof-carrying data (PCD) application, allowing us to (1) refine APIs for implementing circuits and (2) improve testability, including benchmarks. Finish a thorough description of our highly optimized protocol, with security analysis and a specification.”
After completing these objectives ECC are set to decide if it will be feasible to implement Halo 2 in ZCash early 2021.
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