On April 28, Zcash celebrated its six-month anniversary with an official blog post from the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company CEO Zooko Wilcox entitled “Internet Money.”
In it, Wilcox outlined some of the most considerable and significant milestones Zcash have achieved over the past six months. Coincidentally, on the day of the release of the blog entry, Zcash surpassed $100 mln in market cap, establishing itself as one of the top cryptocurrencies in existence.
Active user base and clear set purpose should come first
There are many cryptocurrencies that have been overvalued due to the hype around alternative cryptocurrencies or altcoins. These cryptocurrencies have not demonstrated features, technologies and innovation that complement Bitcoin. Rather, most of the overvalued cryptocurrencies have taken advantage of the initial coin offering (ICO) and the hype around altcoin to sell tokens without an active user base and clear set purpose.
However, some cryptocurrencies or assets are valuable to the community and the development of the digital currency industry in general. Ethereum provides a flexible and functional development framework which Bitcoin does not. Monero and Zcash offer anonymity and financial privacy which at the current stage of development, Bitcoin fails to offer.
Simply put, there are several cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Monero and Zcash that are perceived, recognized and accepted as compliments to Bitcoin.
The most ambitious out there?
Zcash is arguably the most ambitious project out of all, due to its utilization and implementation of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs or zk-SNARKs. Similar to how Monero utilizes the Ring CT technology to anonymize transactions, Zcash uses zkSNARKs to offer absolute financial privacy to users.
Prior to Zcash, zk-SNARKs have not been implemented to many cryptographic projects. Thus, Zcash’s ambitious experimentation of zk-SNARKs can be considered as one of the few cases of true innovation within the cryptocurrency industry.
“Zcash is the first widespread application of zk-SNARKs, a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography. The strong privacy guarantee of Zcash is derived from the fact that shielded transactions in Zcash can be fully encrypted on the Blockchain, yet still be verified as valid under the network’s consensus rules by using zk-SNARK proofs,” Zcash team explained.
First phase of development - check
In the past six months, Wilcox explained that the Zcash development team focused on ensuring security and stability of the network. There were multiple instances of security and bug alerts in last few months but the development of Zcash successfully implemented fixes before any serious exploitations were made.
“During the first six months of Zcash, our development team has focused on ensuring the security and stability of the network, making improved stable releases of the software and supporting third-parties who are building products and services on top of Zcash, such as wallets and exchanges,” said Wilcox.
In the upcoming months, the Zcash team plans to carry out big projects with its partners and growing ecosystem.
On April 14, Cointelegraph reported that Apple accepted Zcash as a legitimate cryptocurrency and was made available to iOS users. Zcash aims to pursue these types projects to further strengthen the cryptocurrency’s growth.