Yesterday the Zcash Foundation, the entity behind the privacy-focused blockchain, announced a new version of FROST, allowing to shield multi-signature transactions.
Bringing multisig to shielded Zcash: Foundation researcher @chelseakomlo published a new version of FROST! https://t.co/ITIoghPHQk
— Zcash Foundation 🛡️ (@ZcashFoundation) July 15, 2020
The Zcash (ZEC) blockchain enables private transactions: this protocol not only provides fast transactions but also features shielding, meaning that transactions can be made more anonymous.
One of the strong points of this protocol is to use FROST (Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold) as a signature system to have an interaction between the various participants who sign the transaction, each using their own private key.
The development of FROST is being carried out also thanks to the collaboration with the University of Waterloo and is in the process of academic review.
As mentioned, the Zcash system allows to shield transactions and make them indistinguishable from each other, so on the blockchain it will not be possible to see the information of the sender or receiver or the amount of the transaction.
This is a protection system that can also be found on the Monero (XMR) blockchain.
As valid as this solution may be, there can be problems, for example if there are multi-signature addresses, i.e. when different actors have to sign and authorize the transaction.
For this reason, it was necessary for Zcash to increase the security threshold for this eventuality.
In order to solve this problem, the Zcash Foundation has worked with its community to improve the system without having to overload the protocol.
Thus, it improved the system in question to make it more effective and achieve the same level of privacy that can be found on non-signature transactions.
Now all that remains is to conclude the FROST academic review process, finalize the Rust reference implementations using RedJubJub as the underlying elliptical curve group and write a ZIP on how to integrate FROST into the Sapling protocol to shield multi-signature transactions.
Zcash thus continues to advance, overcoming privacy concerns and continuing with developments as noted in the latest report.
Meanwhile, the price of the asset continues to rise steadily since the crypto crash, which had made ZEC record its historical low at $18, while it is now easily exceeding $61, with an increase of 338% in recent months.
