The price of Zclassic is moving quite quickly, as it intends to host an upcoming fork of Bitcoin that is privacy-centric.

On December 8th, Zclassic developer and founder Rhett Creighton tweeted that he was going to be teaming up with another Zclassic founder in order to plan more active development for the project. Following that tweet, Creighton posted an entire manifesto one week later on the Zclassic Subreddit, detailing his plan for a new Bitcoin fork called “Bitcoin Private.”

The fork would create a derivative of Bitcoin that utilizes the same privacy protocols as Zclassic, which would enable users to send shielded transactions that hide transacting individuals and values.

Zclassic – Zcash Minus the Founder’s Share

Zclassic originally forked from Zcash to eliminate the 20% founders reward that Zcash put in place for the first four years. Although Zcash is limited to 21 million coins, a percentage is allocated to founders, investors, employees, and advisors to the company. The founders’ reward allocation will eventually be dropped in 2020 due to it being limited to the first set block reward, however, this still accounts for 10% of the entire supply.

This move was similar to the Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Cash splits, in which the original codebase was forked due to an ideological difference. It contains the same nuts and bolts as the original blockchain, with a few tweaked parameters.

Price Gains

Since news of the fork grew in mid-December, Zclassic has seen significant price movement from a recent low in December of $1.64, to an all-time high of over $123.00 within a span of just over two weeks.

Many are attributing the price action to individuals who wish to capitalize on the derivative produced from the fork without having to pay the exorbitant price for Bitcoin. Investors may see Zclassic as an easier way of obtaining more of the forked cryptocurrency at a cheaper rate, considering that Zclassic is currently trading at a fraction of the price of Bitcoin.

Fork-Support

The popularity of recent Bitcoin forks have had both exchanges and wallets in a frenzy due to user requests for support. After Bitcoin Cash forked in August, and Bitcoin Gold forked in October, derivative attempts have been commonplace with December hosting at least five of them.

Some have even likened the strategy to an initial coin offering by calling the process an “initial fork offering” due to the increase in frequency.

Currently, the only known way to receive this new form of Bitcoin derivative is by storing Zclassic in the project’s official wallet.

No exchange has signaled support for the fork at the current moment, but this might change as the date of the actual split approaches. Many exchanges recently have been ‘fork-friendly,’ with Binance and Kucoin supporting multiple forms of the recent Bitcoin derivatives. Although Zclassic isn’t currently supported on these mentioned exchanges, Bitcoin holder demands might lead to full-fledged support if the project is deemed legitimate enough by internal standards.

The fork is expected to occur towards the end of January, and Zclassic and Bitcoin holders will be granted Bitcoin Private on a one to one basis. The supply is expected to be 18.5 million coins (capped at 21 million), resulting from the combined supply of Bitcoin and Zclassic.

Disclaimer: The author of this article currently holds Zclassic.

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