Consider a Zcash-specific namespace for compatibility with CAIP standards

[trevf]

The Chain Agnostic Standards Alliance (“CASA”) maintains a set of Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals that are designed to improve interoperability with products and services that support multiple blockchain-based networks.

Currently, there are no designated practices to follow when interacting with Zcash or its assets using CAIP standards, although many such profiles exist for other networks.

It would be helpful to know if the Zcash community has strong opinions about whether Zcash should be treated according to the CAIP-2 spec as a Bitcoin-based network (which would tag Zcash mainnet and testnet as bip122:00040fe8ec8471911baa1db1266ea15d and bip122:05a60a92d99d85997cce3b87616c089f, respectively), or if a Zcash-specific namespace would be more appropriate.

Thanks in advance!

[daira]

I don't have a strong opinion, but BIP 122 chain IDs seem to have the right properties: they distinguish intended chain forks, but are stable across Network Upgrades that are intended to preserve chain identity. (Chain identity has to be defined by social consensus; there's no purely technical definition that will make the right distinctions.)

Incidentally, ChainAgnostic/CAIPs#4 mentions Zcash:

Blockchains not in this interface

• [Zcash]: BIP122 excluded [explicitly] by List which BIPs apply to Zcash #87 (comment). Further research may be necessary to understand why and if there is an alternative blockchain ID specification.

but as I said at ChainAgnostic/CAIPs#4 (comment) :

Just to clarify, Zcash excluded that BIP from its specification because it was in Draft at the time (2016-10-02). It became Active on 2016-11-30 according to its history on GitHub. All Draft BIPs as of 2016-10-02 were excluded, and this one wasn't going to affect consensus anyway.