While I personally dislike questions as "When moon?" or people hoping for their coin choice to make an x100-x1000 investment gain. I want to make an evaluation of alike minded privacy cryptocurrencies and point out possibilities. Note: This is an opinion piece and not investment advice.



The average crypto enthusiast still overlooks one of the biggest flaws of open ledger technology. Your funds and holdings are visible to everyone. Your neighbors, your family, your friends or enemies. How poor/rich you are, is visible to anyone who wants to look for it. Thus privacy coins try to hide amounts of holdings in varying ways. As well this is the reason for more privacy cryptocurrencies seeing the light of life.





Zerocoin flaws

With the recent news surrounding Zerocoin, a lot of projects using this particular protocol are affected by its vulnerability. This includes Zcoin (XZC), Private Instant Verified Transaction (PIVX), Veil (VEIL), GravityCoin (GXX), Crave (CRAVE) and other projects using Zerocoin as base protocol.



TL;DR: This vulnerability can lead to different ways of privacy exploits. Zcoin itself will abandon the Zerocoin protocol completely and move to another one.



This hasn't been the first time the Zerocoin protocol was vulnerable. Of course, it is silly to imagine that no currency has its flaws. The important factor is, how likely can it be fixed without causing too much damage?





This, however, does not affect Spectrecoin, as it is based on the CryptoNote protocol.





Stealth Staking

While PIVX succeeded to create their approach for anonymous staking of coins with Zerocoin base in 2018 (which unfortunately had to be disabled a few months after and is currently deactivated). Spectrecoin will enable their novel approach of "stealth staking" aka Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake (PoAS), this month on 17th May 2019 with a hard fork. That puts Spectrecoin in the position as the only project to make use of staking coins anonymously.





Price evaluation

As a consequence of the current Zerocoin dilemma, I want to have a closer look at price movement of 2 affected coins in comparison to Spectrecoin's possible chances. The current value of Spectrecoin compared to PIVX and Zcoin stands at:

While coin value can hardly be compared due to the available supply of each currency. Market Capitalisation offers a better way of value understanding against each other. The below chart by Coingecko takes a look on Market Capitalisation of these 3 currencies.

The price differences are massive. How did Spectrecoin succeed to have such low Market Cap in comparison to other coins? It has development and technology as the main aspect. Whenever people find and dig deeper into Spectrecoin, they likely see the potential, while other coins simply pressure with marketing alone, leaving developing their product behind.





Conclusion

In a hunt of best choice towards investment, the market is flooded with ambitious projects. We have yet to see which one will be a great successor. Maybe all of the 2000+ listed projects on Coingecko will succeed. Will 2019 be the year, where Spectrecoin will rise out of its hibernation? Maybe. Is stealth staking a big deal? Definitely.



We will happily welcome you in Spectrecoin's official Discord.

For questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Thank you for reading.