Zooko Wilcox and Josh Cincinnati share vision of Zcash’s future

• Wilcox believes that a scalable layer 1 could be more significant than a scalable layer 2.
• One of Wilcox’s main aim is for zcash to become as programmable as ethereum.

Zcash (ZEC) founder Zooko Wilcox shared his future long-term plans for the privacy-focused cryptocurrency. During an interview with Coindesk, Wilcox admitted that progress has been relatively slow: “In the two years, slightly more than two years, of [zcash’] existence, we haven’t added substantial changes outside of privacy.” Wilcox and Josh Cincinnati, executive director of the Zcash Foundation, then shared their thoughts on the various topics surrounding zcash.

On Sapling

In October 2018, Zcash went through its most significant protocol upgrade to date, nicknamed “Sapling.” Cincinnati said:

“Sapling I think was the biggest improvement of the protocol to date. It was huge. It makes privacy much more accessible and also opens up the door for mobile applications. That was a moonshot project by the Electric Coin Company and it succeeded.”

On Scalability 

Regarding scalability, Wilcox said:

“I’m in favor of an ambitious scalability improvement. I think we need high scalability at layer one in order for us to reach the mission of empowering everyone with economic freedom and opportunity.”

Wilcox also said that he is more interested in a scalable layer 1 than layer 2:

“Even though I think layer two is cool and has a lot of potential and potential uses, I think we also need a scalable layer one. So that’s what I’m pushing for within my company and within the zcash community.”

On Programmability

One of Wilcox’s main aim is for zcash to become as programmable as ethereum. 

“Of course, the way we’d tend to do things is use zero-knowledge proof to make it so that execution of the smart contracts is private and off-chain.”

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