Review on Zcoin by Fabrizio Zampieri
Zcoin is a cryptocurrency that is wrongly considered by many investors to be a…
Zcoin is a cryptocurrency that is wrongly considered by many investors to be a fork of Zcash; in fact Zcoin is based on the Zerocoin paper, while Zcash is based on the Zerocash paper. However, both are the zero-knowledge proofs common, while the approaches to cryptographic encryption are different.
Zcoin utilizes the Zerocoin protocol to provide anonymous transactions in a unique scalable way. The protocol, originally intended to be an extension of Bitcoin, allows you to send coins with no transaction history.
When sending Zcoins, the process works exactly like Bitcoin, with transactions recorded in a public ledger. However, the Zerocoin protocol involves destroying your Zcoins to mint a Zerocoin. Zerocoins are new coins with no transaction history. You are then able to use the Zerocoins in a spend transaction, which converts the Zerocoins back into Zcoins. With many people minting Zerocoins, it will not be obvious who the spent Zerocoins came from, thus preserving your anonymity.
Znodes are nodes on the Zcoin network that are incentivized to run a full copy of the blockchain and to process Zerocoin transactions. The nodes earn a share of 30% of the newly mined Zcoins, 15 every block. But running a Znode will require staking 1,000 Zcoins.
Poramin Insom is the founder and core developer of Zcoin. He originally founded Vertcoin but saw the need for anonymous transactions in the cryptocurrency space. Other important team member is Peter Shugalev, head developer, as well as several other developers and contributors to the Zcoin team.
The first official trading day for Zcoin was October 9, 2016 and during that day, a market capitalization of US $196,192 was achieved.
Currently majority of Zcoin trading volume is on AEX exchange but it is also available on Binance and Bittrex with BTC pairs.
Pros
- - A strong feature of Zcoin is its particularly high degree of anonymity. - Zcoin uses zero-knowledge proofs protocol (it is a method by which one party can prove to another party that she knows a value of x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that she knows the value of x). - It's possible to mine Zcoin (XZC) using the Lyra2z algorithm for proof of work.
Cons
- - High degree of anonymity causes critics of the currency to assume that the token can be used for criminal activity. - There are several other coins associated with anonymity.
