Zcash founder joins Shielded Labs and seeks to promote hybrid PoS upgrade

Zooko Wilcox, the founder of privacy coin Zcash, is seeking to accelerate the protocol upgrade to a hybrid proof-of-stake system after joining Shielded Labs as product manager. Shielded Labs is an independent organization based in Switzerland dedicated to supporting Zcash.

Wilcox recently stated that after eight years of using proof-of-work mining, Zcash needs to upgrade to a hybrid proof-of-stake system. He pointed out that the PoW consensus and new coin issuance have put downward pressure on its price, "but this pressure is expected to ease as the speed of new coin issuance slows down."

The two upcoming major improvements mentioned by Wilcox include the deployment of the Zcash Sustainable Development Fund and an upgrade to "Crosslink," a hybrid PoW and PoS protocol.

He said, "We hope to deploy this technology as quickly as possible while maintaining Zcash's good security record." The benefits of the upgrade include allowing ZEC holders to stake, providing finality to protect users from rollback attacks, reducing transaction times, and allowing for more secure bidirectional bridging to other networks.

However, Wilcox did not provide detailed technical details or a timetable for the upgrade.