Today, I attended an interesting speech at ETHCC in Cannes, where Paul Brody from EY Blockchain introduced the use case of private transactions for enterprises.
The first part of the speech explained why enterprises need privacy, which we all understand well. Then, he discussed Nightfall, an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup based on Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology. From the presentation, it’s clear that Nightfall performs similar functions to what Zcash aims to achieve with ZSAs, sending token arounds in a private way. However, Nightfall operates at a much lower throughput, I heard around 0.1 tps. According to the presentation, a single company might need around 2 million transactions per day for their operations, which translates to approximately 24 tps.
Neither Zcash nor Nightfall currently meet this throughput requirement, but Zcash is undoubtedly performing better than Nightfall. My point is: why don’t we also start targeting enterprises? We have ZSAs in the pipeline, and with Project Tachyon, we will likely scale much earlier than EY Blockchain.
We already have many advantages in place; let’s focus on addressing enterprises.
JP Morgan did use Zcash tech awhile back when working on their Quorum blockchain:
The tech has gotten much better since then. It would certainly a good endorsement for ZKsnarks and could be a good proof of concept for ZSAs if a business were to use them.
Unfortunately none of the enterprise type chains use the public version of the coin, its usually a custom fork run on centralized computers, so there is no benefit to average Zcash users other than a feather in our cap.
I agree this point is hard to overcome without network effects.
Zcash has the potential to become the blockchain privacy market leader with Zk-SNARKs and reach mass adoption. Unfortunately this wont happen until/unless we drop the t address training wheels.
Other more popular chains (Ethereum, etc) will offer optional privacy in the form Zk-SNARKs based transactions and assets. They will become more efficient in time with sidechains, ZK rollups, etc. Zcash cannot effectively compete with optional privacy.
Zcash needs mandatory privacy to dominate and grow its privacy niche for individuals and corporations.
I don’t understand why the transparent address area would limit the adoption of Zcash. I also don’t see why enterprises wouldn’t want to use the Zcash public network, as their primary concerns are transaction throughput and privacy. What I actually observe is a lack of business development efforts to promote Zcash adoption in these use cases.
Great presentation! Interesting thread and points made as well.
I agree, enterprises may be interested by Zcash and it would be interesting to explore that in details. I’ll follow anyone’s thoughts in this thread with attention.
My strongest belief around Zcash, remains how it can be central to the simple aim Satoshi had: cash as per his whitepaper, and more specifically private cash, as per his later discussions. Project Tachyon may be our missing piece and possibly, that’s fundamentally all we need.
The protocol remaining only about cash (private + scalable) may end up being best for us, as opposed to increasing the complexity with ZSAs and such things. Also, the more complex, the more you’ll need governance, and governance, whichever way you do it, is messy. Slowly ossifying like Bitcoin could be an advantage. We do keep upgrading the security as needed, and just keep it at that. That’s one way I could see us succeeding anyway.
I agree that cyber like cash should not go towards too much complexity (the more complexity the more attack surface).
Personally my priorities for zcash would be: #1 NSM to fix the security budget (that’s going to decimate BTC much sooner than people realize). #2 Crosslink for security because indeed neither POW or POS are really secure for different reasons. #3 Tachyon for scability (BTC doesn’t need the equivalent since nobody is using its chain anymore)
and finally #4 ZSAs, could be interesting but as for now I don’t really grasp the utility.
