Zcash’s Halo Breakthrough Is a Big Deal – Not Just For Cryptocurrencies

As CoinDesk reported, “An underappreciated, sideline payoff from cryptocurrency R&D is that it also generates advances within the sector’s component technologies.

“The most important are occurring within the field from which the term ‘cryptocurrency’ derives. Cryptography – essentially, the study of mathematical secrets – is as old as the exploration of ciphers in ancient times. But in the past 10 years, thanks largely to the invention of bitcoin and censorship-resistant money, it’s seen an explosion of activity.

“That’s especially in the sub-field of zero-knowledge proofs, which enable the verification of facts that are derived from a secret the verifier cannot access. These advances matter because zero-knowledge proofs offer the tantalizing prospect of people transacting in confidence without accessing potentially compromising information about each other. Its potential goes beyond the narrow realm of cryptocurrencies to face the ultimate challenge of the Internet age: achieving security with privacy.

“This is why a breakthrough by the Electric Coin Company, the startup behind zcash, is rich with potential. ECC had already been an engine of progress for cryptography by advancing the use of zk-SNARKS, another cryptocurrency-inspired addition to the zero-knowledge proof toolkit, with which zcash produces a provably auditable blockchain without revealing users’ addresses (a disclosure note: Digital Currency Group, CoinDesk’s parent company, is an ECC investor).

“But the company’s recent announcement of Halo, a ‘trustless recursive’ version of zero-knowledge proofs that provides a massively scalable solution to the field’s unwieldy reliance on ‘trusted setups,’ is arguably bigger. If the discovery by ECC researcher Sean Bowe holds up to scientific scrutiny, it could one day unleash a host of powerful, real-world applications for the digital age that go far beyond cryptocurrency.

“Might it even achieve the impossible: lowering  the heat that zcash CEO Zooko Wilcox and his cofounders relentlessly receive  for the 20% founder fee built into the cryptocurrency’s protocol, a deal that has delivered them millions of dollars’ worth of tokens since the launch in 2016? The founders justify the fee on the grounds that it both pays for maintenance and rewards research and development to strengthen the protocol. For now at least, this looks like a discovery that ECC can flag as money well spent – not just for zcash, but for the entire crypto ecosystem…”

Continue to read the full article at CoinDesk.

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