Electric Coin Company Reveals Zcash Network to Transition to Proof-of-Stake in 3 Years – Altcoins

On Friday, Electric Coin Company (ECC), the developers of privacy-focused crypto asset zcash, revealed the network's plans to transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. ECC also announced that the team plans to launch an official ECC wallet and strengthen the network's cross-chain interoperability.

Zcash is switching from PoW to PoS

The Zcash network currently uses a proof-of-work mining algorithm called Equihash, which allows miners to compete with each other to find new blocks on the Zcash chain. In a blog post published on November 19, ECC announced The network will transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm over the next three years. Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn spoke about the network's transition from PoW to PoS in a Blog entry published on August 3rd, 2021.

In addition, ECC CTO Nate Wilcox also released one Blog entry on the topic of PoS a week after Zooko's post. In the roadmap post published on Friday, ECC explains that the transition to PoS will “increase utility for ZEC through features that include yield generation through staking.” In addition, PoS can also lead the ZEC chain to onchain “governance mechanisms”, the details of the ECC roadmap.

ECC aims to “reduce Zcash’s energy footprint.”—Zcash-based ASIC miners still rule the roost

ECC’s blog post goes on to say that a PoS-based ZEC chain can help “reduce the ZEC energy footprint.” Over the year, PoW's consensus algorithms have received a lot of criticism regarding PoW's impact on the environment. ECC's roadmap post adds:

We believe that the transition to Proof of Stake can be achieved within three years if we can focus our time and efforts and hire additional talent.

The value per Zcash (ZEC) has surged since the news, rising 23.6% in the last 24 hours. During its initial launch, the Zcash network's blocks were processed by miners using graphics processing units (GPUs), but in recent years, application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) miners have taken over.

At the time of writing, a Bitmain Antminer Z15 running the Equihash algorithm at 420 ksol/s receives $33.44 per day in ZEC rewards. Innosilicon's A9++ Zmaster makes around 140 ksol/s and makes a profit of $8.13 per day at today's ZEC exchange rate.

What do you think about Zcash switching to PoS? Let us know your thoughts on this topic in the comments below.

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