At block height 500,000 the COLX wallet will turn on the ZeroCoin protocol. This will occur on roughly Sunday September 16th, 2018 (time-zones vary). A previous article was written describing the purpose of this privacy technology in depth, so if you have not yet read it please do. Below we will give a brief overview of what should be done before the protocol goes live.

To ZeroCoin or Not ZeroCoin?

With wallet version 1.1.1 ZeroCoin minting is disabled by default for the colx daemon ( colxd ) and is enabled by default for wallets ( colx-qt ). As a user you need to decide if you want a portion of your (COLX) coins “auto-minted” into Zerocoins (zCOLX). Remember, zCOLX can not be used to stake at this time and is used for anonymity in transactions.

The privacy of zCOLX becomes more effective when there are more of each denomination minted from many different sources. So to ensure its effectiveness, the COLX wallet has a feature to auto-mint (convert) a configurable amount of COLX from the wallet’s balance into zCOLX without the need to manually convert.

Auto-mint starts when the wallet/daemon is started, the wallet is unlocked (either fully or staking only) and the blockchain is synced. This means that if your wallet is encrypted and locked, the auto-mint feature will not engage. When the wallet is unlocked, it will still not touch any UTXO that are locked such as those that are used as collateral for masternodes.

In the standard wallet making this change is pretty straight forward:

In your Settings > Options menu zCOLX auto-mint can be enabled or disabled. If auto-mint is enabled your wallet will always try to mint the % of COLX set here to zCOLX without user interaction. For example; If your wallet contained 100 COLX and a 50% auto-mint was enabled your wallet would automatically turn the 100 COLX into 50 COLX and 50 zCOLX (minus the fee of course).

In the linux/command line daemon it requires a little more work:

Add enablezeromint=1 to the ColossusXT.conf file to turn on auto-minting, or enablezeromint=0 to turn it off. Add zeromintpercentage=X to the ColossusXT.conf file where X equals the percentage of COLX to be minted into zCOLX. Add preferredDenom=X to the ColossusXT.conf file where X is one of the available denominations `50/100/500/1000/5000/10000/50000/100000` or `0` (means no preference at all and let Auto-mint do whatever it wants). If there are not enough coins available for the preferred denomination Auto-mint waits until there are enough coins available.

Please ensure your ZeroCoin settings are correct for your particular use of COLX before block 500,00.

Checklist

Let’s go over what should be done before ZeroCoin is enabled;

Ensure you are running the latest version of the COLX wallet; https://colossusxt.io/downloads-wallet/ Ensure you are on the correct COLX chain. Your wallet’s block-height should match the current block on https://chainz.cryptoid.info/colx/. If they do not match you may be on an incorrect chain. **If you are not on the right chain complete this process: https://goo.gl/YLT1QJ ** Set your ZeroCoin settings as described above in this article

Wrapping It Up

Your transactions can now be protected through the ZeroCoin protocol. For information regarding ARMIS, a new technology being developed by the COLX project to protect your personally identifiable information, please review this article; An introduction to ARMIS