A mini ZEC crash happened over the last day with ZEC plummeting by 15% thus far. The reason behind this is the core development team behind ZEC resigned and left on mass. This is never a good sign as investors do panic wondering what the future holds as these developers were the ones that built and created ZEC are no longer around. These developers created the existing technology and were the ones expected to move it forward. The project is far from dead as nothing has really changed and that is the key problem will there be future development.
The developers mentioned their employment conditions were drastically changed that the team could no longer work with any integrity. This was based around the governance of ZEC and I am not sure what they were now asked to do, but it was so serious they had no choices except to resign. Integrity is a serious word to be throwing around and one has to ask what were they being asked to do that they felt this was so wrong. Is this to do with price manipulation or a change in the agreed distribution percentages as integrity is more about being honest. Integrity when looking at the dictionary states the following - the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles source. The road map is now unclear as to what is going to happen next with ZEC.
Few people realize that ZEC has an all time high of $3191 way back in 2016 so todays price of $407.86 is 87% down from it's peak price 9 years ago. The early investors who held on to their ZEC portfolio are seriously down and the chances of it coming back getting close to an ATH are so far away it is hard to see this happening. One can never say never in crypto, but one also has to be realistic of what is also possible.
The times have changed over the last 9 years and you have superior more advanced privacy technology available that ZEC has to now compete against. ZEC is one of many and are no longer the leading narrative in privacy. Just look at the table below highlighting how COTI using the Garbled Circuits has trounced ZEC on every single category. The privacy future is certainly in the hands of other crypto projects now.
What was also interesting to read was that the ZEC team are staying together and will be working on another project so I guess they will be launching their own privacy project in the not too distant future which will rival ZEC. They must have some extra features which will improve the privacy and hence be better than ZEC.
When you are investing in a project you are also investing in the team or individuals developing the project especially as many are now open sourced. There are so many crypto projects today and we know the majority will not survive because they have to add value for a cross over into the real world or they will be no different to the 17 000 - 20 000 being tracked daily by CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.