Ethereum ($ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin predicts that Zcash and Dogecoin will eventually switch to a proof-of-stake consensus model.

Around 7:00 a.m. UTC on September 15, Ethereum’s Merge upgrade was completed, which means that the Ethereum network is now only using proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin called this successful upgrade “a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem”:

Although Dogecoin and Zcash currently use energy-hungry proof-of-work (PoW) consensus — just like Bitcoin — Buterin hopes this will soon change.

According to a report by Decrypt, this is what Buterin said at at Messari’s annual conference Mainnet (September 21-23, 2022) — in New York City:

I’d say shouldAs proof of stake matures, I expect it to just increase in legitimacy more and more over time… I hope that Zcash moves over. I am also very hopeful that Dogecoin is going to evolve over to proof of stake at some point soon.

On September 23, Vitalik Buterin and Zooko Wilcox (Founder and CEO of Electric Coin Company) had a conversation moderated by Messari Co-Founder and CEO Ryan Selkis.

According to Decrypt’s report, when Wilcox was asked if Zcash developers are also considering a move to PoW consensus, he replied:

We’ve literally been waiting to see what we can learn from Ethereum. I guess what we’ve learned is that it actually works.

On 20 May 2022, Nathan Wilcox, CTO at Electric Coin Company, published a blog post titled “Zcash Proof-of-Stake Research”, in which he wrote:

In August, ECC shared its rationale for moving Zcash from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. While most of ECC is focused on the upcoming deployment of Halo and the shielded-by-default ecosystem in the impending NU5 update, a few of us have begun the initial research phase with a goal of producing a concrete transition proposal to the Zcash community...

This research will ultimately produce a proposal that recommends Zcash move to a proof-of-stake protocol. This proposal could change the broader use case for the ZEC currency and place its underlying technologies at the forefront of Web3. 

To provide ZEC users with as much information as possible, we will be releasing a series of technical research blogs in the coming months. This will give community members a chance to provide feedback and ask questions on our approach, long before we begin developing a specific proposal.

By releasing our research prior to a proposal, we hope Zcash community members understand our vision for the ZEC currency, and why a change to proof-of-stake would benefit ZEC’s utility. We believe this change will create a better user experience, more utility, and more adoption for ZEC, and look forward to feedback from across the community.