jl777 has addressed the issue about competition with Zcash before:
I want to address the issue of "competition with zcash"
There is none.
open source projects are open source in the hopes that other projects utilize it, build on it, maybe even grant back improvements. That is exactly what komodo is doing. Utilizing zcash, building on it and we will of course gladly give back any and all improvements zcash team deems worthy. They are not going to be doing GUI for a while, so maybe we can contribute a dual ZEC/KMD GUI. And if they want to, they can even just strip out the KMD part of the GUI, but they dont strike me as that type.
I have also extended an offer for the 5% staking revenues from the zkp protected funds as there is no way to calculate anything but the aggregate amount in protected form. So this interest can either just extend the coin emission, or it can be donated to the zcash team. So far no interest in this from them. Probably since they are well funded and will be making a ton of money with the ZEC, which I expect to be a game changer in crypto.
The history of zcash starts with zerocoin that Dr. Matt Green wanted to have bitcoin adopt. Well, that didnt get very far... So there is now a zcash company that is creating a bitcoin compatible + zcash combo. Are they doing it with a profit motive? It doesnt look like it to me, they want the zkp tech to be disseminated far and wide. And they are only making money if ZEC becomes worth a lot. Money is nice and pays the bills, but that does not appear to be the primary motivation.
Being adopted by major projects is exactly what creates the big value to the original fork. And being adopted by major projects disseminates the zkp tech far and wide. After komodo's example, my guess is that there will be many other zcash forks so komodo will just be the first of many.
jl777 compares the situation with Apple, Intel, and their "competitition":
zcash has a great team and has done an incredible job putting the zksnarks into bitcoin protocol and they will be continually improving the tech at that level. So it is more like an Apple and Intel "competitition". Does Apple compete with Intel?
i wouldnt say it does. Apple uses the intel processors, along with many others. And Intel does make their own computers, so the analogy is pretty close
I think what people get caught up in is the financial aspect, but when dealing with crypto currencies it isnt exactly like a consumer product. The network effect is one of the most powerful things and the more the zcash protocol is used, the more valuable zcash is. it is not purely a cashflow thing when what your "product" can be used as money.
Money is worth more when more people use it. Now we can split hairs and say if people are using KMD they are not using ZEC, but if you look at the protocol level, both are using zcash.
Looking at the big picture, think about what the effect on zcash would have been had KMD chosen cryptonote tech to use. I think we are in a stage where the industry standards are still not decided on privacy tech. The protocol that gets selected will allocate massive future valuations to the entities that are at the cutting edge of that protocol.
Using the Intel analogy, if you go back in time, once there was a battle between Intel and Motorola in the very early days of CPU. The "protocol" in this case is the CPU instruction set, little endian vs big endian, opcodes, etc. And Intel ended up with the winning protocol so over the decades, Intel grew massively while Motorola languished. When Apple switched to Intel CPU, that was basically the end of the Motorola CPU as far as any meaningful marketshare.
Mapping this to the crypto space, we are in a similar stage. Other than bitcoin, things are all potential and we dont have the mass market version yet. Without privacy, corporations wont use crypto for anything other than petty cash. Looking forward it will be hard to stop the proliferation of crypto based products, just as it wasnt possible to stop the proliferation of CPU based products. How many products have a CPU inside them now? That is a rough estimate to the number of blockchains we will have in the future.
This is why I am working hard to standardize on as much as possible. The bitcoin hashrate to secure all the blockchains. The zcash protocol for privacy. Atomic cross chain swaps for interop. But all this is "under the hood" tech that the fancy GUI will hide from the end user. In one sense it is invisible, but it is as important as the selection of CPU and protocol stack. There are no governing standards bodies, so the standardization needs to emerge from the adoption.
I hope you can better understand why I dont see komodo as competing with zcash.
