Zcash, the cryptocurrency focused on privacy, is preparing for its first Hard Fork.

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While that may bring to mind bitter debates about development, or the expectation of free coins, Zcash's first hard fork, nicknamed "Overwinter", is not really that either.Instead, the team of developers of the cryptocurrency hopes to lay the foundations for more spectacular updates in the future.

While there are some features that are added to Zcash in the update, Zooko Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which develops the network, told CoinDesk: "The goal of this is to do practices to update the network."

Most of the energy of the Zcash team is focused on perfecting Overwinter, which is scheduled for June, while also anticipating the upcoming Zcash hard fork upgrade, called Sapling. This subsequent bifurcation will usher in a major change, accelerating transactions on the network while maintaining the same level of privacy that the cryptocurrency already provides.

Speaking of the names of the updates (the Zcash software stage is now called "Sprout"), Wilcox said it anticipates a smooth transition.

While thinking about bifurcations has changed a bit, hard forks have been seen as controversial, as they are a type of governance mechanism that forces users to move forward along with a technical change.

"If I say 'hard fork', people immediately ask me what is the name of the new currency, and if there will be an airdrop," said Wilcox, who added that he prefers to call Overwinter a "network update".

Wilcox believes that it will be a different case with this hard fork, since "people would prefer to have version 2.0" of Zcash with new features that are unlocked immediately.

In the winter

First of all, Overwinter adds the call protection of reproduction to Zcash, reason why, if some users remain in the previous chain and send transactions, those transactions will not be repeated in the new chain.

It is more of a precaution than a characteristic, Wilcox clarifies, since he does not expect any user to be left out of the new system (although this could be a problem with future bifurcations that introduce more controversial updates).

The feature that most excites him is the addition of the "expiration of the transaction", a mechanism that causes transactions to expire after one hour.

It often happens that transactions stagnate, which remain in limbo because users do not pay high enough rates for miners to pick up the transaction and add it to a block.

"Some people think it's a bad idea," he said.

Those of opposite opinion believe that it could lead to security problems, but for Wilcox, this feature will prevent users from losing money if they accidentally send a transaction in the wrong chain.

The other big change that Overwinter will bring to the Zcash network will address the "signature verification performance", and this will also move Zcash even further into a new role, not defined by Bitcoin.

In the words of Wilcox: "We have an error that we have inherited from the Bitcoin base code, where if you verify the signatures with a lot of (unused transaction exits or UTXOs), it takes too much time. This solves it. "

The Holy Grail?

Beyond these well-known hard fork, Zcash has other plans to face one of the most notorious challenges of cryptocurrencies: climbing.

Indeed, Zcash has already proven to be the cryptocurrency of crazy ideas, making its second "cryptographic ceremony" to keep the private system recently (where attendees do things like burning parts of a computer with a blowtorch).

While the Zcash developers have not been very public about their experimental investigations, so far, Wilcox gave CoinDesk an idea of ​​their work.

For example, the team is following all the great ideas in the current cryptographic space, including Ethereum plasma and fragmentation work, and Bitcoin's open source Lightning Network development.

That said, Wilcox is not sure who will find the Holy Grail of escalation first.

"Maybe it will be us," he said, arguing that Zcash could gain scalability by focusing on his own specialty: zk-snarks.

Known as the technology that anonymizes Zcash transactions, zk-snarks are also a promising way to compress blockchain data.

But he is not yet trumpeting the solution, arguing that even if it works, it will take "years" for the benefits to reach users.

Still, Wilcox concluded that Zcash is in the race:

"We are investigating to see if the use of zk-proofs can make a fully scalable blockchain."