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- Electric Coin Company officially announced that the Heartwood upgrade had formally released.
- The latest Heartwood upgrade will improve interoperability through FlyClient support.
- Zcash successfully forked its fourth major mainnet upgrade known as Heartwood as per the Electric Coin Company.
Electric Coin Company officially announced that the Zcash’s Heartwood upgrade had formally released. The latest Heartwood upgrade will improve interoperability through FlyClient support. The upgrade will also enable the users to shield their mining awards in the coinbase transactions immediately.
🪵 Heartwood is live! 🪵 The latest Zcash network upgrade improves interoperability through FlyClient support and gives miners the option to immediately shield mining rewards in coinbase transactions. Learn more: https://t.co/BG73WAwGoh
— Electric Coin Co. (@ElectricCoinCo) July 16, 2020
Upgrade Approved By The Electric Coin Company And The Zcash Foundation
Zcash is a cryptocurrency that uses cryptography for more enhanced privacy. Zcash is quite similar to Bitcoin because it has the same codebase and has a limited supply of 21 million, just like Bitcoin’s. As of now, the market value of Zcash is $59.24, which is down by 3.64% in the last 24 hours. Zcash successfully forked its fourth major mainnet upgrade known as Heartwood as per the Electric Coin Company. Heartwood activated at block 903000 on July 16, 2020, at 10:56 UTC+00:00. This new upgrade has been released as per the Zcash trademark agreement and approved by both Zcash Foundation as well as Electric Coin Company.
Heartwood Aims At Wider Adoption And Expansion
The first hard forked upgrade named ‘overwinter’ was launched on June 26, 2008, which aimed at improving the scalability and efficiency of the platform. The second upgrade, ‘Sapling,’ which went live on October 29, 2018, reduced the zk-SNARK proving time and also introduced zc and zs addresses. The third upgrade, ‘Blossom’ released on December 11, 2019, reduced the target block time. And lastly, the most recent upgrade ‘Heartwood’ as the name suggests aims at wider adoption, efficiency, and expansion of the Zcash platform
Two ZIP Files Flyclient And Shielded Coinbase Added To The New Upgrade
ZIP-221 (Flyclient) and ZIP-213 (Shielded Coinbase) are the two ZIPs that included in the heartwood upgrade.
The Flyclient ZIP improves the Zcash mainnet by introducing the Proof of Work consensus mechanism and also facilitates cross-chain transactions for its light users. This would include the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) commitments. MMR guarantees the efficiency of the proof mentioned above of the working mechanism. It will possibly help Zcash SRV proofs verified on the Ethereum platform.
On the other hand, the Shielded Coinbase ZIP allows the coinbase address to send mining rewards to the shielded Sapling addresses. However, previously, they were only able to mine rewards to transparent addresses. However, this does not mean that they cannot send rewards to transparent addresses.
