Privacy Coin Zcash Will Soon Undergo Its First 'Friendly' Fork

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

First announced in April, the effort is spearheaded by long-time Zcash supporter Howard Loo.

Loo described in a Zcash forum post that Ycash was a preemptive move to resist future community decisions that may extend Zcash's system of developer funding known as the "Founder's Reward" beyond a promised 10 percent cap of total token supply.

Prominent leaders in the Zcash community such as founder of the coin Zooko Wilcox have publicly expressed their support of Loo's initiative, agreeing to disagree on certain network changes to the Founder's Reward and others that will make Ycash backwards-incompatible to Zcash.

Of course, the value of these newly issued coins, called YECs, on the Ycash network may be significantly lower than ZECs on the Zcash network.

"In order to access Ycash coins, you need to have your Zcash coins at the time of the fork in a wallet that allows you to export your private keys," explained Loo.

For all Zcash users who have left their coins on unsupported exchange platforms, Loo says that downloading ZEC wallets not only secures a user's holdings of YEC but actually creates "Ancillary benefits" to the original Zcash network.

"A ZEC wallet is a Zcash full node so now all of a sudden all of these people who were Zcash users who weren't running full nodes are now running full nodes because they're interested in getting their Ycash," said Loo.

In order to "Make it impossible" to accidentally send Zcash to a Ycash address or vice versa, Loo explains that all shielded addresses will begin with a "y" instead of a "z". "With these bitcoin forks, there was always this concern after the fork of accidentally sending bitcoin to a bitcoin cash address," said Loo.

"To honor the spirit of a friendly fork, we put in engineering effort to change the address format so it's impossible to send Zcash to a Ycash address."

Since the original unveiling of the Ycash initiative back in April, Loo and his team of developers have completed three different dry runs of the split on the Zcash test network and one privately on the Zcash main network.

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