Vitalik Buterin: ETH will integrate Zcash privacy features

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum (fork), recently said that ETH smart contracts will soon add absolute privacy functions.

It has been two months since zero knowledge proofs were included in the ETH development plan.

In an interview with CCN, Buterin said that it will take at least four months to a year for Ethereum to fully achieve privacy similar to that of Zcash (ZEC).

An ETH with absolute privacy can solve the long-standing thorny problem of blockchain: how to conduct private transactions worldwide and share transaction information with designated parties at the same time. Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash, gave a speech titled "Zcash+ETH=Love" when attending devcon2. He said that in the past four years, researchers have found that a transaction can also achieve selective information sharing in a completely private operation mode.

However, Zooko said that this discovery conflicted with Satoshi Nakamoto's ideas, so he has not been able to make reasonable use of it. Now, with the improvement of Zcash researchers in mathematical methods, they have gradually perfected this process: miners can verify transactions according to pre-set network rules without knowing transaction information; at the same time, certain specific objects, such as company employees, regulators, and customers can also verify transactions without revealing any details.

Therefore, what Zcash brings is not simple anonymity, but a mechanism to solve important problems. In other words, Zcash can ensure that while we enjoy the advantages of public blockchain openness and transparency, we can also ensure the authenticity of data and selectively share information.

The combination of Zcash and smart contracts can make this technology more powerful and provide incremental improvements to the current architecture, thereby increasing the system's production capacity and efficiency.

Buterin echoed the sentiment:

The combination of blockchain technology and privacy is an important factor in the development of the security of the next generation of applications.

Scalability and practicality considerations

Integration of Zcash privacy also needs to consider the scalability and practicality of the ETH blockchain. Zero-knowledge proof is a complex mathematical method that requires a lot of memory to solve a large number of problems. Therefore, some people suggest that the integration process only needs to involve contracts or projects, and the ETH protocol should be excluded.

Speaking about the scalability issue, Buterin said:

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) transactions do take longer to process than normal transactions, so 15 ZKP transactions per second is unlikely (in the future, our virtual machines may be able to solve this problem after improvements, but it is hard to say at the moment).

As for whether to integrate into the contract layer or the protocol layer, Buterin said "we still need several pre-compilations for optimization."

ETH's sharding solution goes a long way toward solving the scalability problem. It creates a complex network by specifying nodes and transactions, which operates very efficiently and has transaction verification capabilities equivalent to a full node.

The work of integrating the Zec code framework into the ETH smart contract has already begun. In addition, Zooko also stated that Zec and ETH developers will share talents and establish a close cooperative relationship. The world is about to witness the cooperation of two wise men - Zooko Wilcox and Vitalik Buterin, bringing us a wonderful brainstorm.