The Electric Coin Company, also called ECC, launched and continues to support the Zcash digital coin. This coin is a privacy coin. ECC recently wrote and released a paper called Halo. It is about recursive proof without a trusted setup. On a September 10 blog post, the ECC engineer and croptographer Sean Bowe described a way of making a practical and trustless cryptographic proving technique that can be scaled up. He claims that this concludes his 10 year pursuit of the project. He calls it Halo.

The strategy of the Halo project is supposedly to hold the potential of squishing an unlimited amount of computation. The goal of that is to make a distributed system that can be audited. This will also result in a blockchain that protects privacy and can be scaled up according to the need to do so.

The concept of halo is to show that such computational projects can be checked quickly and corrected on the spot. Bowe's discovery resulted in a sort of nested amortization. It makes repeated collapses of hard problems over many cycles, creating an elliptical curve system. This allows computerized roofs to be used for reasoning, and no trusted setup is required.

In the area of cryptography, a trusted setup happens when a set of baseline parameters are instituted with a plan of being broken at a later time. It is labeled as trusted because the user has to trust the person who made those parameters and believe that they will destroy the parameters.

ECC states that trusted setups are hard to coordinate. They present a risk. Removing them would make a safer environment. Some of the other people who worked on the project said that they saw a first useful example of the composition without a trusted setup. They said that it only used regular cycles of curves with an elliptical shape.

The developers said that their top contribution is a new technique. It should help with fixing existing protocols and techniques. They made it to verify multiple arguments that can have independent interest in a digital coin system for trading.