Zcash Developers Electric Coin Company Team Up With Filecoin and Ethereum Foundations to Explore Applications for Halo 2 Tech

Key highlights:

• Zcash developers Electric Coin Company have entered an agreement with Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation and Ethereum Foundation
• The partnership will be centered around the Halo 2 zero-knowledge proving system
• The partners will also be exploring ways to improve interoperability between Zcash, Filecoin and Ethereum

Electric Coin Company, Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation and Ethereum Foundation team up to explore Halo 2 technology

Electric Coin Company is a firm that’s spearheading the development of the privacy-focused Zcash cryptocurrency. Yesterday, the company announced that it entered an agreement with Filecoin developers Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation and the Ethereum Foundation. Bootstrap, the non-profit organization that owns Electric Coin Company, has received $2 million as part of the agreement. 

The partnership is centered around Halo 2, a technology developed by Electric Coin Company. Halo 2 is a zero-knowledge proving system that will be replacing zk-SNARKs in Zcash. One of Halo 2’s biggest benefits is that it will eliminate the need for a trusted setup, but it will also improve Zcash’s scalability. The technology is expected to be implemented into Zcash in January 2022, but we could also see it make its way onto other blockchains. 

Through the agreement, the partners will be exploring how the Halo 2 technology could be used within the Ethereum and Filecoin ecosystems as well. The partnership will be looking into a potential implementation of Halo 2 in the Filecoin proof system, and will also be exploring a Halo 2 implementation in the Verifiable Delay Function, which is still under development. Another challenge the partnership will be tackling is how implementing recursion into Halo 2 could open up new technologies for use by blockchains like Ethereum. 

Josh Swihart, the VP of growth at Electric Coin Company, commented on the benefits that could result from the freshly-announced partnership:

“The result of this partnership could be that Filecoin uses Halo 2 to increase scalability. These are the kinds of ideas we’ll work on. Beyond that, it could improve interoperability between Filecoin, Zcash, and Ethereum; and it could open up avenues for greater privacy across all of these projects.”

Swihart also described a potential scenario that could be unlocked by the improved interoperability between the three blockchain projects:

“Imagine a scenario where people write smart contracts on Ethereum using Filecoin for storage and shielded ZEC within that contract to pay for the file storage. We’re early, but this partnership is about possibilities.”