ZenCash (ZEN) has been one of the most solid pickups this year as the project has been pretty good at keeping its initial price values compared to the previous January highs and has an overall interesting historical price chart.

Back in June Barry Silbert’s Grayscale Investments has announced that they have added the Zcash spinoff ZenCash to its portfolio next to some of the biggest cryptocurrencies to date. Earlier Barry even stated to CoinDesk that ZenCash is on Digital Currency Group’s “conviction list,” meaning that the firm has “meaningful dollars in a token.”

ZenCash was rather similar to Bitcoin and Zcash initially, but has since introduced several features differentiating it. While using the same fundamental privacy technology called zk-SNARKS as Zcash, the project opted for using Secure Nodes for a more stable and secure network, which gained 3.5% of the mining rewards. Zcash also uses Domain Fronting for hiding users’ internet connection and IPFS for anonymous data accessing and publishing. There is also a treasury fund for development, support and marketing that gains 8.5% of the mining rewards.

Additionally ZenCash partnered with IOHK, the developer group that is working on Cardano (ADA) to work on a decentralized governance protocol (DAO) and scalability for the privacy technology.

Launching a Secure Node and competing for the mining rewards required a transparent address with 42 ZENs in it. The requirements for the soon to be launching Super Nodes are way higher, you can look at this concept similar to what Tiered MasterNodes are. An additional change is that now instead of a 3.5% mining reward pool, Secure Nodes will gain 10% rewards split between them, while Super Nodes will also split between 10%, but with a basic requirement of holding 500 ZENs.

A recent official blog post stated that the ZenCash Super Node tracking servers were made public on the 10th of July and earning will start as soon at 19th of July. Currently the cost of a Secure Node is around $924, with the Super Node being around $11000. This could still make for a decent passive income for those who are believing in the Roadmap of ZenCash and Barry Silbert’s vision.

Here is the intro video of the project found on their website: