Technical AMA w/ Zcash team December 14, 2018 noon PST

[daira]

@hanswurst33

Question 5: i read an article on Zexe, and wanted to know if the Zcash Company is working on that by them self? or is it just a side project?

Zexe is currently just a research paper. It would require significant development to be included in a Zcash network upgrade. I’ve commented about this before on the forum:

@daira

There are proposals, such as P2VK and Zexe, for supporting arbitrary proof statements in a Zcash-like cryptocurrency. This is in principle more flexible than the Bitcoin script system and could support Ethereum-style smart contracts, where (unlike Ethereum or Bitcoin) the statement being proven could be completely private. However, in my opinion just dumping support for that into the low-level consensus protocol without the necessary tooling to write secure contracts would be at best unusable, and at worst a recipe for encouraging people to lock up their money into contracts for which any tiny bug would cause it to be lost. I would expect a few more years of improvement of the tools around zk proof systems to be necessary before Zcash adds something like that.

Note that support for user-issued tokens, which seems to be the main thing people use Ethereum smart contracts for, does not actually require smart contracts.

(In fact User Issued Tokens are feasible in the NU3 timeframe, although I don’t know whether they will actually be included in that upgrade.)

@hanswurst33

With Zexe, is there a use for the Zcash Coin? Like, paying Gas with Ether?

Yes. If we did add this (with the caveats above), it’s likely that the payment protocol would not be implemented as a special case of the programmable functionality, for security, efficiency and compatibility reasons.