I want to shed some light on a couple cryptocurrencies that are the result of quite a few hard forks. The teams begin these coins had a vision for their ideal crypto and believed in it so much that they saw it through to fruition.

The spotlight is on Smartcash and Zencash.

Both of these coins today came to be through various efforts to improve the speed, privacy and governance protocols that Bitcoin was lacking.

The beginnings of Smartcash are interesting in that they technically forked from Zerocoin to build on their privacy features while also realizing the value and benefits that the masternode model of Dash provides.

Even though SmartCash now offers their SmartNodes, it’s important to note that one coin equals one vote, so you don’t need to be a whale to have your voice heard.

Also, Smartcash is allocating a whopping 70% of the block reward to go towards funding their community projects. This one is really taking the idea of community centered governance and taking it to the next level. It really seems like a coin that was created for the sake of growing a network specifically for others to take part in. Also, SmartCash is POW and is able to be mined with GPUs.

Let’s take a better look at the progress Smartcash has made in the short time it’s been active:

If you’re a subscriber to this channel then hopefully you’ve watched the videos that covered how to earn a passive income with cryptos. In that series I mentioned Smartcash and how you can easily earn SMART by just holding their coins in their official wallet. Granted you need to hold a minimum of 1000 SMART to qualify to gain SmartRewards and you’ll also need to not make any withdrawals from that wallet for an entire month in order to begin accruing coins. But if you’re a fan of HODLing than I’d say this one is probably one of the easiest ways to increase your holdings.

If you’re interested in earning a bit more and you’re able to commit more time and energy, they have recently released their SmartNodes.

These are similar to other masternodes in that you’re required to hold a minimum of 10,000 SMART and you’ll need a VPS to run 24/7 with an hour of downtime as an exception. With this you’ll receive 10% of the block rewards. It is because of these SmartNodes that Smartcash has InstantPay, which is pretty straightforward language for instant transactions.

I can’t talk about Smartcash without addressing some of the drama that’s been happening regarding Cryptopia.

About a month ago there was a mandatory wallet update that this particular exchange failed to activate. This created quite a lot of friction considering this left many people without the ability to move their SMART coins onto their desktop wallet, ultimately causing them to miss out on accruing their SmartRewards for that month.

With this news and the multitude of other examples of shady behavior we’ve seen from other popular exchanges, I hope these all serve as healthy reminders to everyone why centralized exchanges aren’t a place to store your crypto.

This is all the more reason why I think more and more people will be searching out decentralized exchanges. If you don’t know what these are yet, please feel free to check out my past videos that explain what they are and why we should be using them instead.

In order to get a better understanding of Zencash, it’s a good idea to learn a bit about the blockchains and coins that it ultimately forked from.

Looking back at the history of Zencash we see that it began when Zcash forked from Bitcoin in an effort to pursue privacy.

This team gave us a type of zero knowledge cryptography in the form of zkSNARKs. You may notice that this privacy protocol has been implemented in many other cryptocurrencies.

Zclassic then forked from Zcash in order to remove the 20% fee that otherwise would’ve gone to the miners. They were interested in a coin with all of the privacy features but without any businesses or investors with the ability to make decisions regarding the development. This is shown by their decision to remove the 20% fee (like in zcash) that otherwise would’ve been allocated to the miners instead of for funding development of the project. The team behind zclassic felt the miners shouldn’t receive less for the sake of funding development. Because of this, there is a great volunteer effort of the zclassic community to help others with issues.

It’s been said numerous times by the team behind Zencash that the fork form Zclassic was amicable. In fact, many of the developers for zclassic who also believed in Zencash and it’s vision for a more robust outlook decided to work to improve both blockchains.

Let’s finally take a look at Zencash and everything it’s about.

ZenCash was launched May 30th, 2017 with an emphasis on privacy. This is seen with their encrypted messaging protocol called ZenTalk, encrypted node to node and node to wallet connections, and Secure file sharing through IPFS protocol.
They currently have over 5000 SecureNodes running. The SecureNode system is funded by the Zencash treasury.

They’ve recently partnered with IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) for Research and Development. This partnership was established to help the team at Zencash with developing a treasury model, or a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, DAO for short. They want to construct it in a way that will properly serve self-governance and self-funding in a way that will ensure the Zencash community can come to consensus and prevent a fork in the future.

IOHK is also going to help Zencash determine the best way to address the issue of scaling as the network continues to grow.

According to their own blog, they are looking into utilizing the abilities of DAGs as an alternative blockchain. This would ultimately enable “…high volume, rapid transactions across the network and therefore lays the infrastructure for radical usability.”

Considering that it’s much easier to address these issues when a project is still new and the network hasn’t yet grown to epic proportions, it’s a great sign that the Zencash team is investing their time and research into the future of this project. It’s not clear when they will announce their plans regarding the implementation of this certain DAG protocol, but it’s expected that IOHK will have recommendations by Q2 of this year.
So keep an eye out for any announcements regarding this in the next several months.

Additional Links/Sources:

LINKS FOR SMARTCASH:

Website
Good Steemit article with basic explanation of nodes
Roadmap
SmartNode Github Bash Installer
SmartNode Setup Troubleshooter
Issues with Cryptopia
Unanswered questions in the Cryptopia forum
Proposals for SmartHive Voting

LINKS FOR ZENCASH:

Website
Zen Blog Post on Partnership with IOHK
Article briefly comparing Zcash, ZClassic and ZenCash
More on zcash, zclassic and zencash
Bitcointalk describes it’s characteristics
Links for all ZenCash social medias and their mining pools
Zencash Blog
Great Breakdown of Zen