ZenCash: What is it?
Before I get into ZenCash, I'd like to start of with a quote on privacy by Edward Snowden. If you don't value privacy then you don't value freedom.
“Privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. That’s who you are. That’s what you believe in, that’s who you want to become. Privacy is the right to the self. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are, on your own terms, for them to understand what you’re trying to be. And to protect for yourself the parts of you that you’re not sure about, that you’re still experimenting with. If we don’t have privacy, what we’re losing is the ability to make mistakes. We’re losing the ability to be ourselves. Privacy is the fountainhead of all other rights. Freedom of speech doesn’t have a lot of meaning if you can’t have a quiet space.”
So, now on to ZenCash. ZEN is the first ever TLS end-to-end encrypted (SSL) anonymous money network, messaging service, content platform, and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
The ZenCash team echoes a similar sentiment of wanting increased privacy and liberty for users in their whitepaper: “We live in a hyper-regulated and surveilled world where billions of individuals are deprived of basic human rights, such as property ownership, privacy, free association, and access to information.”
ZEN formed from a hardfork of ZClassic/ZCash like many other privacy coins. But, unlike other forks, ZenCash has some unique features and a team of developers that set it apart from the rest. Unlike the others (ZCash, ZeroCoin, Bitcoin Private, etc.), ZEN utilizes a masternode system similar to Dash. Recently, ZEN has announced the addition of Supernodes which are higher-stake versions of masternodes as well. The ZEN masternode/supernode system has a lower barrier to entry than a lot of other coins thus increasing the decentralization.
Secure and Private
ZenCash is a private, secure, untraceable, resilient, and minable. Zen is a privacy platform built on zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) technology with a decentralized secure node architecture. ZenCash uses secure nodes to mask transactions, making them indistinguishable from normal HTTPS web traffic. Domain fronting also can be used to bypass any restrictions that a country might install to restrict traffic from other countries or regions. It can reroute the transactions to get to the intended destination.
Domain fronting is a versatile censorship circumvention technique that hides the remote endpoint of a communication. It works at the application layer, using HTTPS, to communicate with a forbidden host while appearing to communicate with some other host, permitted by the censor.
The key idea is the use of different domain names at different layers of communication. One domain appears on the “outside” of an HTTPS request–in the 9 DNS request and TLS Server Name Indication, while another domain appears on the “inside”–in the HTTP Host header, invisible to the censor under HTTPS encryption. A censor, unable to distinguish fronted and non-fronted traffic to a domain, must choose between allowing circumvention traffic and blocking the domain entirely, which results in expensive collateral damage.
Domain fronting does not require special cooperation by network intermediaries. We identify a number of hard-to-block web services, such as content delivery networks, that support domain-fronted connections and are useful for censorship circumvention.
A True Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
ZenCash has the first real DAO (distributed autonomous organization). Other coins like DASH make use of a treasury with trusted 3rd parties. ZenCash is the first to implement funding through the use of a DAO that runs on the ZenCash protocol.
The graphic above illustrates exactly how the DAO works.
There are other talks to enable smart contracts and other types of DAPs that the ethereum type of coins have enabled.
The entire development team is fully decentralized and anybody can participate and even get paid for their work because of how the DAO works.
Specifications
Algorithm: Equihash
Max Supply: 21,000,000 million (same as Bitcoin)
PoW Block Reward: 12.5 ZEN
Circulating Supply: About 3,274,188
*Block Reward Distribution: 3.5% Secure Nodes reward , 8.5% ZenCash team treasury, 88% miners reward.
Coins per month: 216000 ZEN’s
Blocktime: 2.5 minute
Reward halving period: every ~4 years, as per Bitcoin
*The block reward distribution will be updated with the addition of supernodes.