Zcash’s Halo Breakthrough Is a Big Deal – Not Just For Cryptocurrencies

Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.

The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a custom-curated newsletter delivered every Sunday exclusively to our subscribers.

An underappreciated, sideline payoff from cryptocurrency R&D is that it also generates advances within the sector’s component technologies.

The most important are occurring within the field from which the term “cryptocurrency” derives. Cryptography – essentially, the study of mathematical secrets – is as old as the exploration of ciphers in ancient times. But in the past 10 years, thanks largely to the invention of bitcoin and censorship-resistant money, it’s seen an explosion of activity.

That’s especially in the sub-field of zero-knowledge proofs, which enable the verification of facts that are derived from a secret the verifier cannot access. These advances…