Why is XZC going up while ZEN is lagging behind? Please do not tell me it is because XZC is a better coin because that is not true ( ZEN is supported right now on the Bakkt platform whilc XZC right now is not ). Please give me details about why XZC is rising while ZEN is languishing in price. Thank you. Give me some great insight if you can.
I would like to avoid spaculations if possible, BTC is on the move and this is the main cause for all this madness. ZEN/USD parity is pretty stable

Also, how are the coins similar and how are they different? Are they both forks of the same mother coin?
Horizen began as a chainsplit from Zclassic, at block 110,000 so we can say it is not Direck frok from Zcash.
More like this: BTC - ZCASH - ZCL - ZEN ZEN is based on zero-knowledge encryption “zk-SNARKs”.
A common misconception is that Zcoin is a fork of Zcash. Zcoin is based off the Zerocoin paper while Zcash is based off the Zerocash paper. While the Zerocoin paper and Zerocash paper share common authors and both use zero knowledge proofs, they rely on different cryptography. There is otherwise no relation between the two projects.
Zcoin and ZEN use trusted setups, but they are implemented differently.