What Is Zcoin?

Even though Bitcoin will remain the world’s leading cryptocurrency for some time to come, there are a lot of competitors to take note of. Zcoin is one of the altcoins bringing more privacy to the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole. Its private financial transactions are enabled by the Zerocoin Protocol.

What is ZCoin Exactly?

On the surface, Zcoin attempts to solve Bitcoin’s privacy problem. Even though a lot of people think Bitcoin is anonymous, that is not the case whatsoever. More specifically, there is no anonymity or privacy involved with Bitcoin, but it remains to be seen if Zcoin can do a better job in this regard. At the same time, Zcoin needs to prevent double spending attacks, which is addressed by Bitcoin through its public ledger.

How does ZCoin Work?

There are quite a few aspects of Zcoin worth taking into account. First of all, its implementation of Zerocoin lets anyone turn public coins into private coins. That in itself is pretty interesting, even though doing so does create a mining problem. After all, privacy is not designed to be easy, not even in the world of cryptocurrency.

Another intriguing aspect of Zcoin is that the spending of coins does not require the owner of minted coins to reveal his or her information. This allows for semi-anonymous transactions, even though it is not necessarily a feature most people will be looking for. To most cryptocurrency users, the default process of minting privacy coins will work just fine, although it remains to be seen how the general public responds to this new currency.

Zcoin also boasts some other interesting technologies. With its MTP algorithm, Zcoin has no security centralization problem as Bitcoin does. This is achieved through a process known as Egalitarian Computing, which doesn’t allow any mining entity to gain a competitive advantage. Instead, Zcoin’s protocol establishes the same price/cost for any computation unit across all platforms. There’s also the Znodes infrastructure, which is somewhat similar to masternodes associated with other cryptocurrencies on the market today.

The Road Ahead for ZCoin

Throughout 2018, we will see many interesting developments for the Zcoin project. A decentralized marketplace will be created, which is always something to look forward to. Node peers will benefit from encrypted communication moving forward as well. Moreover, the team wants to focus on addressing potential future scaling concerns. However, no specific details have been announced for any of these.