The new upgrade of the Zcash blockchain, called Blossom, is coming soon.
This was reported by the CEO of Electric Coin Company, Zooko Wilcox, announcing that it will be activated tomorrow, December 11th, 2019, at block 653600.
The purpose of Blossom is to improve the user experience and scalability by reducing confirmation times and doubling network capacity.
A countdown has been published on z.cash/upgrade/blossom, according to which, on the assumption of about 150 seconds per block, the upgrade should take place at 21:59 UTC.
Blossom is the third Zcash network upgrade and is supported by both the Zcash Foundation and Electric Coin Company.
Why the Blossom upgrade?
This update will increase the frequency of blocks, allowing transactions to be confirmed more quickly. The aim is to increase the number of transactions that can be supported per hour but keeping fees low.
The Zcash nodes will need to be updated to be compatible with the new protocol, and for this reason, a special guide has been published.
As far as end-users are concerned, there is no need to do anything, because the upgrade only affects the generation of blocks.
However, several third-party service providers have already announced their support for the upgrade, including Coinbase, Coinomi, Exodus, Jaxx, OKCoin, The Rock Trading, ShapeShift, Circle, Antpool, and so on.
Zooko also revealed that the reason for this upgrade is not related to the current operation of the network, which shows no problems of speed, but to the potential development of scalability, since several developers who are working on new apps choose which network to rely on based on their perception of the future scalability.
In this regard, Wilcox said:
“The Blossom upgrade demonstrates that Zcash can make pragmatic engineering decisions to increase the capacity of the network while maintaining our high standards for security and reliability. It is a prelude to our long-term Scalable Zcash initiative”.
