The project completed its third fork, which activated the new Blossom network. The update had a slight positive impact on the price of ZEC, the Zcash token.
The Zcash project successfully completed its third scheduled fork, whose code name is Blossom, on Wednesday, December 11th. This was announced by Electric Coin Company (ECC), the company behind the development of Zcash, in its Twitter account @ElectricCoinCo.
The update, which was supported by both ECC and the Zcash Foundation, occurred at block height 653,600, extracted at 21:51 UTC by the mining pool Poolin, as reflected in the Zchain block explorer. At the time of writing this note, they have added about 700 new blocks to the chain, without any reported setbacks.
It is worth highlighting that one of the main novelties of the Zcash Blossom, or NU2 update (Network Upgrade 2), is the halving of the time between blocks, which went from 150 seconds to 75 seconds. The modification was part of the Zcash ZIP 208 improvement proposal, which also implies a half-reduction of the block reward.
It is explained in the GitHub repository of the proposal that the reduction of the time between blocks is aimed at improving network performance, at the same time as guaranteeing the security of transactions with fewer confirmations. Besides, low confirmation rates would be maintained.
Zcash Blossom Activation Does Not Raise ZEC Prices
The new features in the Blossom update seem not to have aroused great enthusiasm in investors. In the week before the hard fork, the price of ZEC, the Zcash native token, registered a slight upward movement, from a valuation of USD 28.18 to USD 30.80 per unit, a variation of less than 10%.
This increase does not compensate for the sharp decline in the price of this cryptocurrency, which is focused on private transactions, in the last three months. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the ZEC tokens were quoted around USD 53 by September 18th. However, a few weeks later, around November 25th, it marked its all-time low record of USD 25.45.
Some hours before the Blossom hard fork, a well-known analyst who is identified on social networks as WhalePanda, published a tweet in which he described the Zcash project as a failure for its current market capitalization. “After a round of financing, 3 years of rewards from the founder and a request for an extension of these rewards, the market capitalization of its currency is even less than that of Dogecoin (DOGE),” WhalePanda remarked.
His comment derives from the fact that DOGE, which emerges from a popular meme in social networks, is ranked 31st in the CoinMarketCap ranking, while ZEC occupies the 33rd position by market capitalization. Even though, according to WhalePanda, the DOGE project has not received an update in five years.
The influencer’s post received a response from Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, who said that Zcash privacy research has had a major impact on cryptocurrency technology. Buterin explained that it has been doing cutting-edge research and deployment of privacy technology, at the same time as exploring uncharted terrain in blockchain governance, and the platform continues to improve. He said not to have any idea of how it can be considered a failure.
By Willmen Blanco
