In this episode, Anna Rose catches up with Sean Bowe, a Zcash core developer now leading work on Tachyon, the upcoming Zcash shielded pool upgrade. They discuss the evolution of Zcash’s technical roadmap over the past five years and how it has influenced the design of Tachyon.
Sean then walks through the cryptographic ideas behind Tachyon, including its proving systems, new techniques for pruning nullifiers without disrupting other parts of the protocol, and how the upgrade aims to address Zcash’s remaining scalability bottlenecks. They also explore plans for Zcash governance, wallet UX, and the long-term outlook for privacy-focused zero-knowledge systems.
Related Links
- Tachyon Website
- Zcash
- Electric Coin Company (ECC)
- Halo (ZK Proof System)
- Orchard Shielded Pool
- Tachyon (Zcash Upgrade)
- ZK Podcast: Halo with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from ECC
- ZK Podcast: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups and Elliptic Curve Cryptography
- zkSummit4: Sean Bowe on Halo: Recursive Proofs without Trusted Setups
- A Note on Notes: Towards Scalable Anonymous Payments via Evolving Nullifiers and Oblivious Synchronization by Bowe and Miers
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