Why you should pay attention to ZenCash

 A Privacy-Enhanced, Store-of-Value for the Digital Economy, powered by a Privacy Platform. 

   I've been following ZenCash since it's inception, it surprises me how underrated this project is, I have no doubt that it will become a top 10 MCAP coin and i will state why in this article.

It should come as  no surprise that the smart money, is investing now, always a step ahead of the crowd, a unfair battle for most, they have access to specialized research teams scavenging every project, and assessing its (risk \ reward) and also detailed information about market metrics, quant analysis, and crowd sentiment.  

 For those that don't know Barry Silbert runs a multi billion dollar fund, @DCG, and it's one of the most prominent investors in the industry. 

 Why the world needs more Zen?  

  PS: My Agenda is to shill, and  share my knowledge about the project, like i said previously,  I've been following the project since its inception from the ZClassic days!  I've just finished loading my bags and I’m riding this rocket to Mars.  

 So what is ZenCash?  What can ZenCash do for you? And finally, why is ZenCash one of the most exciting projects on the crypto scene? 

 So what is ZenCash?    

ZenCash slogan on their site is “The Secure & Private Platform it's money, messages, & media”, but truth is, it's much more than that, it's really hard to define ZenCash in a couple words, so I'll do my best and break it down.  

 I'll start by the team. 

 Lead by Rob Viglione, ZenCash Team is one of its biggest assets. 

 Who is Rob Viglione ? 

  Rob Viglione is a Finance PhD candidate @UofSC with research interests in cryptofinance, innovation, asset pricing, and bank liquidity creation. Former physicist & mercenary mathematician. 

  After watching a handful of interviews, it becomes clear we're in the presence of one of Crypto thought  leaders, in a time where mostly everything in crypto is superficial and a collection of buzzwords to pump the price at any costs, it's refreshing to hear him, we're in presence of a men with a mission. I have no doubt that he will help shape the future of Crypto. 

 Quoting Rob Viglione, when asked how he is going to compete in this thriving industry: 

  “How we're going to compete with all of the projects in our space, Telegram being the highest profile new entrant. Reorging, building an awesome team and unleashing them productively, learning from our competition, and relentlessly improving and iterating to find our niche(s) should help. The world needs more privacy projects so I'm glad to see the new competition...we'll learn from them, I'm sure they'll learn from us if we do our job right, and society should benefit either way. We're just at the start of this industry and there's many trillions of dollars worth of value to create across industries around the world...I'm sure we'll find our niche regardless of who enters the space.”

For the last months ZenCash has undoubtedly adding some serious talent to their team, Check them out -> https://zencash.com/team/

 The Privacy Currency Aspect 

 ZenCash is a privacy currency, powered by zk-SNARKS.

  For those who've never heard of zk-SNARKS, I'll try my best to simplify a highly complex mathematical concepts. Zero-knowledge proofs means that two parties can conduct a transaction, share information, verify the information is accurate, all without revealing the information or transaction itself.

  In practical terms, it means that you can do a completely untraceable transactions without leaking any information about it (metadata), the only thing that will show up on the ledger is the proof of the transaction.
There is not information about the sender or receiver or the amounts. 

  Its important to state, that in the zk-SNARKS field,  ZCash leads the way and innovates, and in the good open source spirit ZenCash takes all the updates and integrates them in their protocol. 

zk-SNARKS is undoubtedly the leading privacy protocol,  unlike the coins that use mixers, like Dash & Monero, zk-SNARKS don't leak any metadata.  

 Edward Snowden about the zk-SNARKS 

 ZenCash Economics:  

 Total Supply: 21.0M 

Current Supply (May 2018): 3.7M
 

 
Proof of Work: Equihash 

ZenCash monetary base is identical to Bitcoin - 21 millions Zen will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will go towards a treasury fund for development & research & marketing & support. 

Current Block Reward is:

88% miners

3.5% secure nodes

8.5% treasury

It's going to change to:

70% miners

10% secure nodes

10% super nodes

10% Treasury

 ZenCash leading the way with Transparency 

 In a industry where there's little or NO transparency in regard how funds are handled, ZenCash is creating a standard for the entire industry, real transparency and accountability.

 What is Radical Transparency ? 

• All community spending will be publicly available on a portal, then aggregated into spending categories.

 This kind of ethical approach can be observed transversely through the whole project, have I mentioned the Bi-weeklys ?

 This kind of ethical approach can be observed transversely through the whole project, have I mentioned the Bi-weekly's ?n the last two weeks.

 

 ZenCash Research and Development

Not only ZenCash has a great engineering team but they are also partnered with IOHK for Research and Development. IOHK is the RD Lab, lead by the irreverent Charles Hoskinson (one of the Ethereum founders), and is behind Cardano (ADA), another great project destined to do great things. 

This partnership entails two huge projects:

• A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Treasury 
• Scalability Study,  next-generation scaling solution (DAG), more specifically the Spectre & Phantom protocol being researched.

 To find more about this partnership visit: https://zencash.com/iohk/   

 ZenCash leading the way in the Governance field 

 Zen is developing a state of art DAO Governance.

 
I'm not here to reinvent the wheel, going to cite a great explanation, on what a DAO is and why a DAO matters.

What is a DAO and what problems does it actually solve? 

The main attraction of a DAO is how it enables trustless governance. This means that a true DAO will run itself automatically, without having to trust any individuals or entity to function. Historically, many theoretically decentralized governance structures have come to be, but with rules and laws written on paper. These systems inherently trust participants to follow the rules, or at best provide incentives to behave honorably, but can never ensure that the rules are followed. With a DAO, participants are limited to the rules of the system, with no room for corruption. A well-designed DAO can theoretically make decisions that are not optimal, but are technologically incapable of corruption. 

Decentralized structure minimizes external threats

A true DAO also minimizes external threats, a concept commonly known as “censorship resistance.” A traditional organization that has somehow managed to remain true to its mission can nonetheless be conquered and compromised by force. A perfectly democratically-elected government or board of directors of a company can nonetheless be intimidated and taken over by a hostile group, and be forced to dismantle or centralize. With a DAO the rules of the organization cannot be modified through force, and the loss of a few key members does not jeopardize the rest of the group. Even if the majority of the DAO’s membership is destroyed or forced to exit, new members can simply join in and continue to run the group without issue. The implications of a truly censorship resistant organization on today’s global stage are huge.

Self-funding gives strength and autonomy

The final crucial piece of the DAO is self-funding. By functioning without any outside help, the organization remains immune to major conflicts of interest, or de facto control by powerful entities. A fully decentralized organization that doesn’t pay its own bills has to rely on donations, corporate sponsors, and other methods in order to continue to function, and those funding sources can completely control the output and actions of the group indirectly. Self-funding takes care of this problem and ensures the integrity of the DAO.

What's so special about ZenCash DAO ?  

Some of this innovative features in ZenCash DAO, are only possible due the introduction of zk-SNARKS,  and opened the possibility of anonymous voting.

Right now the most advanced solution on the market is the Dash DAO,  Dash is currently leading the research on the field and have shown the feasibility of such model.

With that said, there's three major flaws in Dash DAO, which ZenCash addresses.

1.  All the voting is public. This opens a can of worms for different reasons, and influences the whole fairness of the process.  In ZenCash DAO all the voting process is anonymous and the results are only known in the end.
2. Voter Apathy. There's no incentive to vote, which in turn leads to voter apathy. ZenCash Dao rewards all the voters, distributing 10% of the treasury fund to voters.   
3. On Dash only masternodes can vote, if you want to purchase a masternode at current prices it will cost you around 400,000 USD dollars. In ZenCash any stakeholder can vote no matter the size of its stake.

 How the ZenCash DAO Works? 

1. A funding pool is available for proposals.  The funding process occurs during a fixed amount of blocks (approximately one month).  We’ll define this period as a treasury epoch.   In order to vote, Zen stakeholders will have to lock an amount of ZEN as collateral at the beginning of each epoch.  The stake will be kept on a special smart contract address that returns the funds at the end of the treasury epoch.  Stakeholders will receive X amount of ballots, proportionally to the stake they have locked up.  Stakeholders will not know the value of their stake.
2. Anyone can submit a proposal, there will be a small submission fee to discourage spam.
3. Eligible Zen stakeholders review and vote on proposals. Results are hidden using zk-SNARKS cryptography.
4. Votes are weighted according to stake and is not public.
5. Zen stakeholders can delegate voting responsibilities to trusted users.
6. Ballot results are secret until the winner is announced to ensure fairness.
7. Votes are counted. Approved proposals are sorted out in descending order, from the highest positive vote count to the least. The system will fund every proposal in this order until it reaches 90% of the funding pool.

The remaining 10% of the funding pool is allocated to reward voters. At the end of the treasury epoch, the locked funds (stake) is returned to the voters along with their respective compensation (proportional to their stake) for participating in the voting process. 

 

ZenCash leading the way with Usability 

 ZenCash is tackling one of the biggest problems of the industry,  Until 2016 Crypto's were mainly used by IT geeks, ZenCash plans to lower the entry barrier aiming for mass adoption, therefore catering all its services to the avg Joe, one shouldn't need to know how what's a elliptic curve in order to use Crypto.

They even has gone as far as creating their own User Experience Department!
Every stakeholder is a customer.

• 24/7 Help Desk - No other Project has a 24/7 Help Desk, in most Crypto projects you need to scavenge the website in order to find a support address, and if you're really lucky after a couple of months you'll get a response.

 Check https://support.zencash.com 

 

• Easy to Use Wallets & Services - New Flagship wallets on the pipeline, consistent design and experience between all OS

 ZenCash  node network and the Secure Nodes & Super Nodes

 Let's start with a interesting fact, right now ZenCash is the #2 node network in Crypto, ahead of Bitcoin, LiteCoin, Bitcoin Cash, with 10K nodes , only behind Ethereum, who is bound to be dethroned by ZenCash due the new reward structure they just announced.

Why is important to have a resilient node network ? 

Running your own full node is the only way to have full control and to ensure that all the rules of ZenCash are being followed. Nodes do this by rejecting blocks and transactions that don’t follow the consensus rules and by rejecting connections from peers that send them (or too many of them). 

In this sense, nodes are more important than hash power as they are the ones that verify that the blockchain is following the rules. Even with the longest Proof-of-Work chain, nodes will still determine if said chain follows the rules and whether or not it is accepted or ignored.

So how come ZenCash achieved this massive node network ? 

 ZenCash pays the Secure Nodes operators out of its block rewards 

 So 3.5% of the block rewards goes towards to secure node operators.  

 What's Special about the Secure Nodes? 

 ZenCash Secure Nodes  encrypt all the inter-node communications. ZenCash node communication looks like any other encrypted Internet traffic, instead of like Bitcoin traffic. This helps to hide the type of activity taking place, making it less likely that ZenCash users and nodes are blocked. 

 No other project has this feature 

 Secure Node Requirements ?  

 The basic requirements of Secure Nodes are:

• Maintain a minimum of 42 ZEN in transparent address per node. Demonstrates the operator cares enough about ZenCash to own some.
• Create and maintain a valid TLS certificate from a known Certificate Authority. This enabled encrypted data transport.
• Run the node on a server with enough processor and memory so that it can meet a computational challenge. This protects against DDoS attacks.
• Maintain a full copy of the ZenCash blockchain. This makes sure no UTXO’s or commitments are lost.
• Keep the node up and running at least 92% of the time.

 Super Nodes (In dev) 

 Recently Zen published a new White Paper , announcing a tiered node system, and introducing many changes. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=Dt7t-P-OmBY 

The Super Node network will support a multi-layer sidechain. One of the layers will be used to store all the information about the Secure Node status and the Super Node status. 

The Super Nodes will support multiple layered sidechains, which will form the basis for developing the system as a platform. These will be used for a variety of applications and will be exposed through a common interface to include RPC methods. 

The Goal is to open the platform to external dApp developers so that anyone can contribute to the ecosystem directly. 

Check the new whitepaper here

Super Nodes Requirements

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

 Let me emphasize the importance of the Super Nodes  

Not Only ZenCash has one of the most resilient & high performance node networks in whole crypto (Currently #2 just behind #Ethereum), but they are also harnessing all its power and building applications on top of it, and make it available to dApp developers. 

 New Block Reward Structure 

How Much can you Earn by setting up a Secure Node & Super Node ?

Super Node Calculator -> http://supernodes.lebre.net/

Secure Node Calculator ->  http://securenodes.lebre.net/ 

 
ZenGrid (In dev)

Global decentralized supercomputer, harnessing the power of the SuperNode  Network, Golem project (GNT) focus solely on this aspect and has a 460M Market Cap, at the present day.  

 ZenPub (In dev)

Decentralized file storage solution, harnessing the Secure Nodes & Super Nodes.SiaCoin focus on this aspect and has 1B Market Cap. 

 ZenChat

 Shielded transactions on the Zen Cash network can have an 1024 chars message attached to them, encrypted together with the relative transfer data on the blockchain. This permits Zen users to communicate on ZenTalk for a tiny fee, straight to one z_address wallet or to a channel where multiple people participate. ZenTalk Messages are encrypted end to end with AES 256 paired with Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), the state of the art for what concerns secure and anonymous digital communication

 ZENHide (In Dev) 

ZenCash wallets are going to support domain-fronting, making it impossible to censored & monitored or blocked . Domain fronting is a technique that circumvents Internet censorship by hiding the true endpoint of a connection. Working in the application layer, domain fronting allows a user to connect to a blocked service over HTTPS, while appearing to communicate with an entirely different site.

 ZenCash Scaling 

Like i previously mentioned, ZenCash is partnered with IOHK (The team behind Cardano), one of the projects is a joint study on blockchain scalability. 

There are two  solutions being evaluated Spectre & Phantom,they are both a next generation alternative to blockchain with unlimited scalability and near-instant transactions. These joint research projects will facilitate borderless, high-volume, and rapid transactions across the ZenCash network, as well as establish the necessary infrastructure for global usability.

With the deliver of this project, ZenCash will be in the forefront in regard to  transaction throughput , and one step ahead from pretty much all it's competitors. 

Theoretical models for this two protocols, show to achieve a throughput similar  to VISA.

Phantom protocol, also opens the door to Smart Contracts. 

 Final thoughts: 

Let's put ZenCash in direct comparison with it's privacy competitors 

#Monero -> 4B #Dash -> 4B #ZCash -> 1.1B #Verge -> 1B
#ZenCash -> 150M

ZenCash has so much going on compared to its peers, it's a excellent privacy coin , and also a whole privacy platform and transitioning to dApps and potentially to Smart Contracts, in my opinion it will undoubtedly become a top 10 project. 

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References, can´t seem to add references on steemit so I´ll just leave them here 

   "Robert Viglione, Author at Bitcoin News." https://news.bitcoin.com/author/robertviglione/

   "Bitcoin Forum." https://bitcointalk.org/

   "ZenCash Update: Operation Radical Transparency – Crypto Coin ...." 8 Jan. 2018, https://www.cryptocoinupdates.com/zencash-update-operation-radical-transparency/

  "ZenCash Treasury and Voting Model Update - ZenCash Blog." 23 Mar. 2018, https://blog.zencash.com/zencash-treasury-and-voting-model-update/. 

  "What Is a DAO and Why Is It Revolutionary? - Dash Force News." 11 Dec. 2017, https://www.dashforcenews.com/what-is-a-dao-and-why-is-it-revolutionary/ 

 "ZenCash and IOHK partner for Research and Development." https://zencash.com/iohk/ 

 "ZenHelp The First Cryptocurrency Help Desk - ZenCash Blog." 5 Apr. 2018, https://blog.zencash.com/zenhelp-first-cryptocurrency-help-desk/ 

 "Biweekly Update Live - YouTube." https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhZisbhyYIXLOm2Z0d088uelS4DwKikCn 

 "6 Reasons to Run a Bitcoin Full Node - Bitcoinist.com." 18 Mar. 2017, http://bitcoinist.com/6-reasons-run-bitcoin-full-node/. 

 "ZenCash Secure Nodes Create a Distributed and ... - ZenCash Blog." 5 Oct. 2017, https://blog.zencash.com/secure-nodes-why-are-they-important/ 

 "ZenCash Secure Nodes." https://zencash.com/securenodes/ 

 "ZEN Whitepaper Final for Real - ZenCash." https://zencash.com/assets/files/Zen-Application-Platform-Whitepaper.pdf 

 "ZenCash Investment Analysis – VerthagOG – Medium." 4 Jul. 2017, https://medium.com/@VerthagOG/zencash-investment-analysis-28f7702a5cec