There three Zs, including the Big Z (Zcash), and the two small Zs (Zcoin and ZenCash) suffered pain together with the whole market with the recent Bitcoin led market sell down.
All three of these coins offer users a privacy oriented cryptocurrency, a coin where transactions between wallets can't be tracked and enumerated by third parties. This has had obvious attractions from the very start with Bitcoin, which many initially erroneously thought provided privacy, but which it is increasingly clear as time goes on doesn't. Particularly if a well organised third party is interested enough to dig deep.
Zcash, Zcoin and ZenCash s are three of the main contenders in the privacy coin space. Zcoin is technically substantially different from the other two. Zcash and ZenCash are in many ways similar technically, but they are very different in terms of their market positions. Let me be blunt and get to the point, I see serious upside to ZenCash, I'm neutral to slightly positive on Zcash, and I would avoid Zcoin like I'd avoid an aggressive Ebola infected male chimpanzee.
Let's start with the similarities. All three coins are relatively new, although ZenCash is the newest. Zcoin and Zcash actually started around the same time late last year, although I think Zcoin started about a month earlier. ZenCash started around the start of June this year. All three coins also use zero-knowledge proofs to provide reliable privacy to shield transactions from third parties.
Zcash and ZenCash conceal both the identity of sender and recipient AND the amount sent, whereas Zcoin only conceals the identity of recipients. There are reasons for both approaches, and I'm neutral on which is preferred. In fact, my reasons for preferring Zcash and ZenCash over Zcoin aren't to do with their respective theoretical technical parameters.
It's to do mostly with implementation and the development teams. I have held all three coins, so I took some interest in their development teams. There is no doubt that Zcash, which by the way has by far the highest market capitalisation, has the most well known development team of the three. Zooko Wilcox and others on the team were well known in cryptography, academia and industry well before they founded Zcash. The only real criticism of Zooko and the Zcash team I have seen are fairly sad slurs on his/their ethnicity. So, stupid criticism.
The ZenCash team is as yet less well known than Zcash's team, but many of their team members have both fairly long term presence in the cryptocurrency space combined with useful work experience in the US military and running businesses. I trust the ZenCash team and I believe in their abilities. But overall it's also fair to say Zcash's team has been higher profile historically. Despite this, I don't prefer Zcash over ZenCash, for reasons I'll explain below.
Which brings me to Zcoin's leadership team, which is basically Poramin Insom, a young Thai man postgraduated from US college, and the people he hired. Unlike for Zcash and ZenCash, I don't trust this team. There are different reasons for this. One is I think they are inexperienced, and have made bad decisions. The other is there is a credible possibility that a hack of Zcoin that inflated the coin supply by about 20% at the time was done by the developers. And third is they just keep missing the mark: the nonfunctioning wallet, and failure of their plan to implement a new mining algorithm called MTP that they bet the bank on for examples.
But aside from that, there's a market reason I don't like Zcoin. For most of its history, more than 50% of Zcoin's volume happened on the Chinese exchange BTC38. Check it, as I'm typing BTC38 accounts for 54.55% of total volume, and Bittrex most of the rest. Yes, you can see why this worries me can't you? Because china IS BANNING BITCOIN EXCHANGES. It doesn't take a Fields Medalist to work out if BTC38 gets closed by the Chinese government what that might do to Zcoin's price.
Which leads me to Zcash and ZenCash. I like them both, I trust their developers, and they've never pulled a fast one on me. You could sort of consider the relationship between Zcash and Zcoin a bit like the relationship between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. ZenCash is in some ways a "daughter" of Zcash, having used the same source code, but now slowly diverging as ZenCash adds some different features like secure nodes.
If you look at Zcash's chart on coinmarket cap,
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/#charts, you'll see that it's very stable relative to Bitcoin. It really tracks closely to Bitcoin. The adventurous might even use this trend to pair trade it with Bitcoin, although I feel pair trading cryptos is probably dangerous. I like Zcash, but I prefer ZenCash. I'll tell you why. I think Bitcoin will go up for the rest of this year, and I think Zcash will go up in equal measure. But I think ZenCash has the possibility to PUMP.
ZenCash has got a market cap of $15 million to Zcash's $370 million. I mean, Zcash could pump too, but the point is IT HAS ALREADY PUMPED. It went up from $30 a coin to its current $170. I firmly believe the larger the market cap of a coin, the harder it is to get really massive pumping gains, where price doubles again and again. Zcash is probably still small enough to double, theoretically maybe to do that twice. But a nice $15 million marketcap, $7 coin like ZenCash, well in my view it has much more room for exponential rise. Or in other words outperformance of Bitcion. ZenCash has already outperformed Zcoin, it used to be worth considerably less per coin than Zcoin, but has recently overtaken it.
Well, grovelling apologies and gestures of supplication to any privacy coin I didn't mention (yeah, I don't want a firestorm from you Monero fanboys:) ).
Thank you for reading, and good luck out there in the market. Remember, if you are trading control the emotion, don't let it control you.
