A New ZCash Software has Been Released to Support Sapling Upgrade
As the cryptocurrency and blockchain get more matured and sees more massive investor participation, a large number of digital currency networks are seeking an update in order to accommodate more players on the platform thereby improving the liquidity of the tokens.
Recently, the ZCash development team has now unveiled new software that consists of the support elements of the much-awaited and planned ‘Sapling’ update of the ZCash network, scheduled to take place ahead this year.
According to the release notes published on Wednesday, May 30th, the latest software update 1.1.1. will put the initial consensus rules while preparing for a Sapling-based testnet. The proposition for the Sapling update was first put forward by the ZCash team last year in February 2017. The Sapling upgrade aims at improving the transaction speed of the network.
However, for the Sapling hard fork to effectively take place, the ZCash network must attain an activation “block height” which the developers claim that it will be included in the next software upgrade.
The official blog post for the software release explained that "As a reminder, because the Sapling activation height is not yet specified for mainnet, version 1.1.1 will behave similarly as other pre-Sapling releases even after a future activation of Sapling on the network. Upgrading from 1.1.1 will be required in order to follow the Sapling network upgrade on mainnet.”
As a part of further operations, the ZCash network is set for Overwinter upgrade scheduled next month in June which will also establish a stepping stone for all the future hard forks.
Zooko Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which develops the network said: "The purpose of this is to get practice doing network upgrades.”
In addition to ZCash, other major cryptocurrencies like the Bitcoin and Ethereum are scheduled for some major upgrades to its network in order to reduce the congestion on their network by expanding its capabilities thereby increasing the transactions speeds and reducing the costs of transactions.