What is ZenIP 42204: Deprecation of Shielded Pools
ZenIP 42204 for the deprecation of the Horizen mainchain shielded pools was submitted recently. Here’s what it means.
ZenIP 42204 proposes the removal of shielded transactions with transparent inputs from the Horizen mainchain, which will prevent shielded transaction (T addresses to Z addresses) support at the consensus level.
Does this mean Horizen will no longer support privacy or any type of shielded pools?
No. ZenIP 42204 does not propose the complete removal of the shielded pools or privacy features from the Horizen platform. It only proposes to remove the support for shielded transactions with transparent inputs (T addresses -> Z addresses) on the mainchain level. Also, the proposal focuses on reducing the importance of the shielded pool by preventing new transparent inputs being sent to it. These transactions make up only 2% of the shielded transactions on the mainchain.
Why ZenIP 42204?
ZenIP 42204’s goal is to ensure Horizen does privacy technology the right and sustainable way to drive ecosystem growth and minimize risks. It proposes a solution to the following risks that prevent the greater Horizen community from fully and freely participating in our ecosystem.
Eliminate technical debt
Horizen’s implementation of shielded transactions relies on ZCash’s outdated Sprout technology. Moving away from outdated technology will give Horizen room to improve and innovate privacy technologies.
Regulatory threats
The current regulatory environment makes privacy cryptocurrencies more difficult to access and be adopted. For example, Horizen has already been delisted from a major exchange in the Republic of Korea and excluded from popular industry applications like Crypto.com.
Supporting privacy features on the mainchain level is not the only way to offer privacy capability for the Horizen ecosystem. Horizen’s mission is to ensure data integrity and privacy freedom by enabling real-world use cases. Horizen’s privacy vision relies on a secure and decentralized mainchain that supports Horizen’s sidechain platform to focus on more scalable and resilient data privacy. The purpose of ZenIP 42204 is to de-risk the Horizen vision.
What’s Next?
ZenIPs are for the community to approve or decline. Horizen has always believed our community comes first, but how do we ensure that the community can continue to access Horizen and transact ZEN safely across the world if our technology falls behind and regulations continue to restrict our user base? Is ZenIP 42204 the answer?
Please join the conversation and make this decision with us. We will be hosting a series of town halls on Discord to have live conversations about this decision, but we recognize that it can be difficult to match global time zones. So to ensure that we can include everyone, we are recording a new episode of the Beyond the Horizen podcast with our co-founder Rob Viglione. We will collect your questions and feedback for the podcast in the coming days.
We highly encourage you to read the full ZenIP on GitHub to get a complete understanding of what this means. We also hope to see you all join the discussion on the #zenip channel on our Discord server. The team will be fielding questions and building a Q&A for the community.
In his recent blog, Rob shares his thoughts on ZenIP 42204 and how this change can grow the ecosystem further in 2023. He stated, “My vote is on pivoting away from being a privacy coin and embracing the advances we’ve made in being a network of blockchains with Ethereum-compatible smart contracting. I prefer to be proactive against potentially adverse regulations and to remove the possibility that our base layer could be made illegal one day. With these foundations secure, we can focus on an explosion of use cases that add substantial value to the industry.” You can read his full blog on Medium.
We welcome all discussions about this ZenIP and hope you will all join us on Discord. We will also be sharing information on the town halls and collecting your questions for the podcast soon. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Discord to join the conversation about this proposal.
