ZCash Analysis
Written by CryptoDigger, 11/13/17
This is my general analysis on the Zcash Cryptocurrency. We will be talking about three main subjects: technical overview, the team and market analysis on the coin performance.
Specifications:
- Date of launch: 28th of October 2016
- Circulating Supply: 2,641,256 ZEC
- Algo: Equihash
- Consensus Mechanism: POW
- Mining Pools: Nanopool ; DwarfPool ; EthPool
- Mining Software: Claymore ; Genoil
- Market Cap: $780mill
“The Zcash Company aims to set a new standard for privacy through the use of groundbreaking cryptography.“
What is Zcash?
Zcash is a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private.
Zcash is based on peer-reviewed cryptographic research, and built by a security-specialized engineering team on an open source platform based on Bitcoin Core’s battle-tested codebase. It’s improvement over Bitcoin is the addition of privacy. Zcash uses advanced cryptographic techniques, namely zero-knowledge proofs, to guarantee the validity of transactions without revealing additional information about them.
Technical Overview
GitHub - Their GitHub’s account is fairly active with regular updates and that is a sign of the continuous development.
Supported Platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac, Webwallet, Android, iOS
Whitepaper - If you are a more advanced “connoisseur“ of software development I recomend you to have a complete read on their whitepaper.
The Team
The ZCash team consist of many people. They are a large team with a lot of experience.
The Founder, Zooko Wilcox, has more than 20 years of experience in open, decentralized systems, cryptography and information security, and startups. He is recognized for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko’s Triangle”, Tahoe-LAFS, BLAKE2, and SPHINCS. He is also the Founder of Least Authority.
They have 7 scientists on the team, 9 members in engineering, and one in social media.
Market Analysis
Current price per coin: $293 (11/13/17)
What are zk-SNARKs?
Zcash is the first widespread application of zk-SNARKs ("Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge"), a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography. The strong privacy guarantee of Zcash is derived from the fact that shielded transactions in Zcash can be fully encrypted on the blockchain, yet still be verified as valid under the network’s consensus rules by using zk-SNARK proofs. Read more about it here.
Final Thoughts
Zcash in terms of technology and team is one of the most promising coins I can see in crypto. With a huge development team I’m sure they will have a lot to offer in the next couple years.