For those interested in more details, avsa (@avsa, Alex Van de Sande, Ethereum UX guy) broke down a list of the Metropolis (Byzantium) changes a few days ago: h

For those interested in more details, avsa (@avsa, Alex Van de Sande, Ethereum UX guy) broke down a list of the Metropolis (Byzantium) changes a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/702t95/eli5_byzantium_changes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/702t95/eli5_byzan... You can read the release notes here btw that point to the EIP and Github issues for "Precomipled contracts for modular exponetiation; elliptic curve addition, scalar multiplication and pairing" here: https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/09/14/geth-1-7-megara/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/09/14/geth-1-7-megara/ AFAIK there were only 4 precompiled contracts (ECDSARECOVER, SHA256, RIPEMD, and IDENTITY) so this is sort of a big deal, but I think the right way to go (being able to natively support zkSNARKs, or RingCT/RuffCT directly on ETH would be incredibly powerful. The practical implications for this particular change is being able to run private tokens directly on Ethereum (vs globally visible transactions), although AFAIK the initial zkSNARKs implementation is not currently compatible w/ ERC20 tokens ATM.