Zcash Releases New Software That Supports Sapling

The development group of the zcash cryptocurrency has launched new software that contains support components of the system’s planned Sapling update, set to occur not long from now.

Sapling isn’t the main hard fork for zcash  – that is Overwinter, which is slated for late June of this current year – puts the first consensus rule in place as it prepares a Sapling-based testnet, as indicated by release notes published on Wednesday.

The Zcash group initially uncovered insights about Sapling back in February last year, which is intended for accelerating exchanges on the system, as previously detailed.

What’s missing is an activation ‘’block height’’ – basically, the correct transaction block at which point the sapling hard fork produces results – and as indicated by developers, this will be incorporated into a future update.

“As a reminder, because the Sapling activation height is not yet specified for mainnet, version 1.1.1 will behave similarly as other pre-Sapling releases even after a future activation of Sapling on the network. Upgrading from 1.1.1 will be required in order to follow the Sapling network upgrade on mainnet,” the blog post clarified.

As already reported by CoinDesk, next month’s overwinter redesign is situated, to some degree, as an approach to set and organize for future hard forks – a procedure that has stirred debate for other blockchain protocols, in particular, Bitcoin – to take place on zcash.

“The purpose of this is to get practice doing network upgrades,” Zooko Wilcox, co-founder, and CEO of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which builds up the network, said in March.