Privacy cryptocurrencies are one of my favorite spaces in the cryptosphere.
The other day I talked about Monero, today it’s Zcash.
Right now Zcash is the second largest privacy cryptocurrency, trading around $205 with a market cap of $464 million.
The team behind Zcash is the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company (ZECC). Its goal is to fix what it believes is a major problem with bitcoin, its lack of privacy guarantees.
ZECC positions itself as a science-driven and boasts an impressive team of scientists, engineers, strategic advisors (including Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Andresen), and outside counsel. ZECC is led by CEO and founder Zooko Wilcox.
It also has an all-star lineup of investors including Fenbushi Capital, Naval Ravikant, Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, and Fred Ehrsam.
There’s also the Zcash Foundation which launched in March 2017. It’s a non-profit with the goal promoting the protocol and it gets funded by receiving 1.44% of the monetary base over a four year period.
Zcash was launched in October 2016.
It’s an implementation of Zerocoin, which itself was an improvement from Zerocoin. The same team behind Zerocoin now works on Zcash.
The technology behind it is called zero knowledge proofs. It allows you to prove knowledge of some fact about hidden information, yet not reveal that information.
The zero-knowledge proof used is called zk-SNARKs, which stands for zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge.
Basically, Zcash makes it so the transactions are both verifiable and private. For more details check out the FAQ.
There are some criticisms of Zcash. One is that the supply has been set artificially low in the beginning which creates artificial scarcity. When it first launched, one ZEC traded for more than $6,000, now it’s around $200. Right now, the ZEC supply is just 2.2 million, and it will have an ultimate supply of 21 million.
On the plus side the zk-SNARK technology will be adopted on Ethereum as part of the next update, Metropolis. How that will impact ZEC, I’m not sure.
What do you think of Zcash?
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