Zencash (ZEN) Review – The Secure Platform for Money, Messages and Media

ZenCash is a cryptocurrency with selective privacy or transparency. Users can either have full private addresses or addresses which are pseudonymous as in Bitcoin. It is designed go beyond the traditional cryptocurrency to be a sort of startup nation, or full peer-to-peer economic system for money, media and messaging.

Update: ZenCash announced a hard fork as a response to the Equihash ASIC miner.

Article Summary

• The Idea and the Team Behind ZenCash
• ZenCash Partnerships
• ZenCash Price History
• The ZenCash Technology
• The ZenCash Network
• The ZenCash Hard Fork
• How to Purchase ZEN
• Where to Mine ZEN
• How to Store ZEN
• Roadmap and Future Updates

The Idea and the Team Behind ZenCash

ZenCash is a mineable cryptocurrency that is also a Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrency. That means that miners verify all transactions of it on the blockchain by connecting to the mining rigs, verifying transactions and solving the hash for the blockchain. They receive rewards for this work in the form of ZenCash.

ZenCash is a fork of ZClassic, which is a fork of Zcash, which was a clone of Bitcoin. Security was the reason for the fork which resulted in ZenCash. You can also think of ZenCash as Bitcoin, but with added security and anonymity. Another difference between ZenCash, Bitcoin and Zcash is its rewards program, which budgets a significant amount to development, marketing, and the operations of ZEN.

This is noteworthy as the goal of ZenCash is to become the most useful privacy cryptocurrency in the marketplace. It will need significant resources to do this.

ZenCash Partnerships

In October, ZenCash announced a partnership with Welto, an application that allows users to pay bills directly through cryptocurrency wallets. At the beginning of the year ZenCash announced its partnership with IOHK, a leading blockchain research and development company, to promote private and secure transactions for people globally.

In addition, it partnered with StormX, a lockchain adtech and micro-task company.

ZenCash Price History

ZenCash did not have an ICO. Instead, it began as a fork from Zcash.

The coin rose to $62.43 in January and shows signs of increasing again, rising 40% after announcement of trading on Binance. The coin often rises in price after news such as the Welto partnership in October of last year

The ZenCash Technology

ZenCash is a TLS end-to-end encrypted anonymous money network, messaging service, content platform, and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). (TLS is a Transport Layer Security, a cryptographic protocol that enables security over a computer network).

The ZenCash has four main systems which work to protect user identity:

• ZenCash – Allows for easy transfer of value by using regular (T) and private (Z) addresses.
• ZenChat – Allows messaging from a wallet that is part of a customizable secure communications network.
• ZenPub – Allows users to anonymously publish data, documents, and media in a way that is resistant to censorship. Technically speaking, it’s an anonymous document publishing platform using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which is is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system.
• ZenHide – Hides the remote endpoint of communication with domain fronting. Domain fronting allows a user to connect to a blocked service over HTTPS, while appearing to communicate with an entirely different site.

The ZenCash Network

One of the unique features of ZenCash is its ability to reward full node operators directly from block rewards, while at the same time mandating these same node operators to hold valid certificates, minimum computational capacity, and minimum uptime requirements. Although these requirements resulted in a higher quality and more reliable node network, it still hosted logic off-chain. It now enables sidechaining, which means than in addition to being a cryptocurrency, ZenCash is also a platform on which an unbounded set of services can be built.

Secure Nodes

Secure Nodes are special nodes required on the network with high-quality systems that meet minimum requirements, including:

• 42 ZEN is a t-address for staking
• Monitor the network messages for challenge messages
• Respond to challenge messages with identifying information of the Secure Node
• 92% daily uptime
• a valid SSL certificate for communicating with other nodes and wallets

Secure Nodes assist in creating a decentralized network to make projects free of any type of censorship. They form the foundation of ZenCash’s widespread, encrypted communications network that is secure, stable, anonymous, and decentralized. Secure Nodes are rewarded for ensuring encryption in all communications, maintaining the ZenCash blockchain, and providing certificate-based encryption for ZenCash wallet applications.

Super Nodes

Super Nodes have even higher requirements on the network:

• 500 ZEN in a t-address for staking
• Multiple CPU cores
• 8 GB of RAM or more
• 100 GB of storage or more
• 96% node uptime per day

These higher requirements allow the Super Nodes to be given responsibilities such as managing key network and system functions such as hosting multiple services on sidechains, tracking and measuring Secure Node uptime, and scheduling payment for miners. The newest feature of these Super Nodes is that they offer tracking and payments off-chain.

Rewards

ZenCash seeks to avoid over centralizing the Super Node architecture, which is now greater due to a staking requirement of 500 ZEN. To counteract this risk, ZenCash has increased the rewards it grants to provide greater incentives for node creation.

• Nodes operators will receive 20% of block rewards (a change from 3.5%), to be split among Secure Node and Super Node operators. Each will receive 10%.
• Treasury will receive 10% of rewards, (previously set at 8.5%).
• Miners will receive 70% of block rewards (a decrease from 88%).

The ZenCash Hard Fork

Many users raised concerns about increasing centralization and control of the ASIC miner from Bitmain mining ZenCash. The Bitmain AntMiner Z9 Equihash ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) miner is supposed to be more energy efficient than the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) miner.

The issue was that the Bitmain miner mines cryptocurrencies for itself in addition to selling their miner internationally, and if they developed a more powerful miner that could maintain 50% of the mining hashrate, it would give them significant influence over any specific cryptocurrency, including of course, ZenCash.

ZenCAsh responded to this issue by modifying the hashgin algorithm, which resulted in all miners now being incapable of mining ZenCash. This modification to the code, also known as a Hard Fork, is risky because anyone running the old version no longer has access to the network. A temporary solution might be to change the code to allow GPU mining for a short time or continually change it to render ASIC mining impossible.

The new code changes also include a number of other improvements, including the deployment of Super Nodes, which allow higher performance and a more stable platform for the servers. The new infrastructure with the Super Nodes will be tested before the mandatory upgrade. In addition, the new upgrade will include distribution that allocates 70% of the mining rewards to miners, 10% to secure node operators, 10% to Super Node operators, and another 10% to community funds.

How to Purchase ZEN

Binance is the main option for purchasing ZEN, as well as the exchange where it has the highest volume of trading. It is available for purchasing with either BTC, ETH or USDT.

ZEN is also available on the following exchanges:

• Bittrex (Trade ZEN with BTC on Bittrex)
• Upbit (Trade FCT with BTC on Poloniex)
• OKEx (Trade FCT with BTC on Upbit)
• Cryptopia (Trade ZEN with BTC on Cryptopia)
• OKEx (Trade ZEN with BTC on OKEx)

How to Store ZEN

ZEN can be stored in a number of desktop, web and mobile formats across different operating systems, including Arizen and Swing wallets for desktop wallets for Windows, Max and Linux; Web Wallet for browsers; Android as a mobile wallet for Android users; and Paper Wallet, an offline method for storing cryptocurrencies.

For maximum security, we recommend storing your ZEN offline.

ZenCash will offer a paper wallet as well in the future.

Roadmap and Future Updates

ZenCash launched in 2017, developing the first blockchain with TLS integration. It developed several different wallets, including the Arizen, Swing, Android, and Paper Wallet that same year, as well as secure nodes that offer end-to-end encryption.

It will continue to develop, with the goal of hardware wallet integration, improvement on the Secure Nodes, and delivering products to the market in 2019.