Zcash Founder Joins Shielded Labs for Hybrid PoS Upgrade

At Shielded Labs, Zooko Wilcox has taken over as head of product. She aims to expedite the protocol’s transition to a hybrid PoS consensus mechanism.

After joining Shielded Labs, Zooko Wilcox, the creator of the privacy coin Zcash, hopes to expedite the protocol’s conversion to a hybrid proof-of-stake system.

The creator of Zcash and the current head of product at Shielded Labs, Zooko Wilcox, stated in a blog post on August 10 that the privacy currency has to switch to a hybrid proof-of-stake method after eight years of utilizing proof-of-work mining.

He said its price has been under pressure due to PoW consensus and the issuance of new ZEC$41 coins, but “this is expected to ease as the rate of new coin creation reduces.”

The two primary planned enhancements mentioned were implementing the Zcash Sustainability Fund and switching to “Crosslink,” a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake protocol.

He stated, “We want to deploy this as quickly as possible while upholding Zcash’s stellar safety record.”

The upgrade offers protection against rollback attacks, speeds up transaction times, permits safer two-way bridges to other networks, and makes staking for ZEC holders possible.

Wilcox did not specify a timeframe for the update or go into detail about the technical details. PoS interoperability was initially brought up by the company that developed Zcash, the Electric Coin Company (ECC), in 2021.

In the meantime, the ECC revealed on August 8 in a post on X that Zooko had moved to Shielded Labs, a separate Swiss company devoted to assisting Zcash.

“This news is a win for the Zcash community, and we look forward to collaborating with Shielded Labs on Zcash hybrid PoW/PoS.”

Additionally, Shielded Labs declared that Vitalik Buterin, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and other Zcash holders and advocates had contributed generously to the company.

The money will support the organization’s growth and enable it to collaborate with ECC to give priority to the creation and execution of Crosslink, the statement continued.

Zcash was introduced in 2016 as a payment currency that prioritized privacy, resembling the Bitcoin BTC$58,510 from which it was split.

Josh Swihart was elevated to take over as CEO of ECC after Zooko Wilcox resigned in December.

Since being taken off the list by several prominent, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in 2023 due to regulatory pressure, the price of ZEC has stayed the same.

As of this writing, ZEC was up 40% over the previous week, trading at just over $41.

However, according to CoinGecko, the privacy currency has dropped 98% from its all-time high of $3,191 in 2016.