Digital currency Decred (DCR) has added post-quantum secure mixing to Stakeshuffle, its opt-in privacy system, the company said today. The release of Decred v1.7 provides protection for privacy of mixed coins against quantum computers, a move it claims is an industry first.
Decred v1.7 also includes four consensus votes, the most notable being the vote to modify the block reward split between proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, and treasury from 60/30/10 to 10/80/10, substantially reducing the subsidy paid to miners.
Funding for the shift was approved by stakeholders on the project’s off-chain proposal system, Politeia, last month. The proposal to change the block reward distribution was presented to stakeholders by Decred’s co-founder Jake Yocom-Piatt, referencing on-chain data, which showed ongoing price suppression funded by mined coins in Decred markets.
“Changing the subsidy split is a major change, but I would not propose such a change if I did not see it as absolutely vital for the project,” said Yocom-Piatt, who added the code for the change has been completed and documented and is ready for stakeholders to vote on in v1.7.
Another feature of v1.7 is the integration of a payment verification (SPV) Bitcoin wallet into DCRDEX, Decred’s decentralized exchange. This major upgrade allows users to transact without downloading a Bitcoin wallet and the entire Bitcoin blockchain and makes the exchange – one with no platform trading fees – more widely accessible.
“Decred v1.7 contains several new technological innovations in governance, security and privacy,” added Yocom-Piatt. “The project continues to demonstrate its ability to evolve and adapt with the will of its stakeholders and improve the security of their coins and their privacy.”
Yocom-Piatt has been using, funding and directing the creation of open-source software for more than 10 years and has been featured as an expert source in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Coindesk, and many more. Prior to Decred, he funded and oversaw the creation of btcsuite, an alternative full-node Bitcoin implementation written in go, whose source code has been used in several other notable projects such as Lightning Network (lnd), Ethereum, and Factom. He also is a co-creator of zkc, a high-security asynchronous chat system.