One major drawback of public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum is that every transaction is logged transparently and immutably to a distributed ledger, meaning the sender, receiver and amount are all visible for the world to see, forever.

That said, if you keep your wallet addresses non-KYC'd you would remain pseudonymous, meaning that although the transactions made by your wallet could be traced through the blockchain, they would not be linked to your government ID.

In order to make transactions fully anonymous, privacy coins like Monero and Zcash were launched years after Bitcoin. These cryptocurrencies keep the senders, receivers, and amounts completely hidden so that they cannot be linked to an ID, nor traced.

In this post, we will discuss the increasing demand for privacy coins, Zano's "Confidential Asset" feature, and a core limitation of all anonymous cryptocurrencies.

Increasing Demand For Privacy

As investors grow more concerned with the confidentiality of their digital assets, privacy coins have grown in popularity.

In fact, Zcash is up more than 200% since the beginning of October, and lesser known privacy coins like PIVX and Zano have also been increasing in value.

Zano's Confidential Assets

Zano, which launched in 2019, also makes transactions untraceable and anonymous. Unlike the optional privacy of Zcash, all transactions are private by default on Zano.

Zano has some interesting features that set it apart from other privacy coins.

In addition to the base coin ($ZANO), Zano also enables users to send and receive tokens anonymously, meaning things like stablecoins and wrapped Bitcoin can be transferred between parties while keeping both the sender and receiver addresses completely concealed.

Moreover, Confidential Layer provides a fully decentralized, non-custodial bridge that allows users to wrap major crypto assets (like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana) into private Zano-based equivalents, while maintaining a one-to-one backing.

Verifying Total Supply

One selling point of a transparent cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is that anyone can sync the public ledger to their own node and verify the total number of coins by using blockchain analysis to sum up the unspent outputs.

In the case of privacy coins though, how can we keep tabs on the total supply if all transactions are obfuscated? For example, what if a hacker exploited a bug to create new coins and sent them to himself in a private transaction?

Both Monero and Zano are designed to maintain supply verifiability through cryptographic primitives and protocol rules. Coinbase transactions (mining rewards that introduce new coins) are fully transparent.

However, if a RingCT bug were to let someone create coins inside a private transaction, the extra coins would be hidden, and the public coinbase sum would still match the expected emission.

In practice though, the community would know within days via markets, exchanges, or chain forensics, even if the blockchain itself stayed "clean." This is why privacy coins rely on code audits and real-world monitoring for integrity, not just math.

Until next time...

As more investors decide to move their money onto censorship-resistant blockchains, they could opt for privacy coins, instead of transparent chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, to keep their funds confidential.

Zano's Confidential Assets feature enables investors to keep their funds private, including stablecoins and wrapped assets from other blockchains. All things considered, Zano is definitely a privacy coin worth keeping an eye on.

If you learned something new from this article, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the Hive blockchain. You can also follow me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Sources

Zano's Blog Post [1]