Announcing Zcash Blossom and proposed feature goals

We’re not ready for that. The missing pieces include lack of shielded support for some common uses of scripts (especially multisig and hash time-locked contracts), and the dependence of coinbase transactions on t-addresses.

That said, we could include some preparations in this upgrade, for example enabling payment of mining fees, block rewards, and maybe FR directly into Sapling addresses. There is also a possible method of supporting shielded multisig without a further consensus change, taking advantage of the fact that RedJubjub is a Schnorr-based signature scheme. Shielded HTLC support is more difficult because I think it requires a circuit change, but it probably wouldn’t be a blocker on its own for deprecating t-addresses.

If all goes well, I would expect that the next upgrade after Blossom, in 2020, would be a good candidate for disabling sending to t-addresses (but you could still send from them). This is purely my personal view; it is not something we’re committing to, and I haven’t discussed it with other Zcash engineers.

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