ZenCash, a privacy coin for borderless decentralized communications and transactions, has announced that it has successfully conducted system upgrade in partnership with blockchain development company IOHK.

In its official release, ZenCash stated that has upgraded to a highly secure, transaction replay-resistant system via a soft fork. Its partnership with IOHK supported the transition and will help accelerate the project’s technical timeline.

“Zen would like to humbly thank its network of supporters for their combined efforts in upgrading the entire system. The incredible success in moving to a system that no longer accepts blocks potentially containing transaction replays has made the Zen ecosystem substantially more secure”, ZenCash Co-Founder Rob Viglione said. “Zen would also like to extend its gratitude to IOHK, a company synonymous with world-class blockchain development, for its technical leadership in upgrading the system’s security throughout the transition. IOHK’s dedication and cryptography expertise has improved Zen’s ability to prevent successful malicious attacks and places ZenCash on a fast-tracked path to being the leading privacy coin”.

The software transition required all participants in the ZenCash network to upgrade their node software before the soft fork rules were enforced. The transition was supported by a team of independent experts led by IOHK developers. IOHK dedicated cryptographer, IT security researcher, and developer of Ukrainian cryptographic standards the Kalyna block cipher and the Kupyna function Prof. Roman Oliynykov, and cryptographer and a software developer Dmytro Kaidalov Ph.D. to support the ZenCash project.

“I believe that privacy is a foundational human right and enjoy the tremendous innovation the cryptocurrency space has brought to the discussion. ZenCash’s team has the right background, knowledge and character to understand both the technology and philosophy behind the delicate intersection between privacy and security. Thus, I’ll be working closely with them to try to amplify their efforts and advise where and when consulted”, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson said.

Zen’s accelerated technical timeline included implementing Segregated Witness, the development of improved wallets for the web, Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, and Android, building hardware for t and z transactions, messaging, GNUnet publishing, and the creation of a domain fronting service for z transactions using a commercial content distribution network (CDN). In addition, Zen said that it will establish systems servers in multi-data center configuration and undergo rigorous infrastructure resilience testing and refinement to ensure security, redundancy, and lower latency.

“Zen’s talented core team and large supportive community are effectively working hand-in-hand to progress the platform. ZenCash has the support of a fantastic exchange partner in Bittrex, which has announced plans to review the Zclassic and ZenCash wallets after our community rapidly upgraded nodes to prevent the risk of transaction replays”, Viglione added.