Biggest Gain

This month, Horizen saw a roughly +52% increase from $117.98 to $178.93.

Biggest Loss

This month, Dash saw a drop of about -22%, dropping from $67.64 to $52.64.

Current Standings:

By percentage gain/loss between for the month of November.

$ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, last month was at $117.98 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $178.93 (+52%) $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, last month was at $46.16 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $47.04 (+2%) $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, last month was at $32.07 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $32.49 (+1%) $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, last month was at $61.82 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $61.99 (+0.3%) $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, last month was at $339.18 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $315.72 (-7%) $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, last month was at $83.95 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $78.39 (-7%) $BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, last month was at $54.95 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $49.11 (-11%) $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, last month was at $75.38 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $64.55 (-15%) $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, last month was at $64.19 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $51.98 (-19%) $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, last month was at $65.68— is now (as of Jan 1st) at $52.92 (-20%) $DASH: Dash — Started at $100, last month was at $67.64 — is now (as of Jan 1st) at $52.64 (-22%)

Interesting Notes:

The wildcard entries are still performing as wildcards should (wildly). Loki is leading the pack and Dusk is bringing things up the rear. Loki is up over 200%, while Dusk is down over 70%.

4/11 of the coins this month finished in the green, the same that was seen in the previous update.

Still, only 2/11 coins have increased in value since the beginning of the Battle of the Privacy Coins started, they are Loki and Horizen — the two coins with a private messaging aspect to their project.

In overall standings, Loki the Monero fork is outperforming Monero, the Bytecoin fork.

News & Updates

In order of overall standings…

The Loki Messenger rebrand was announced as Session. While no official launch date has been given, an expected hard fork in January should lay the foundations for the final development push — with a release expected in Q1 2020.

Loki Messenger users can now own and moderate their own group chat servers.

Loki Project Lead, Simon Harman, did a talk discussing the forces behind the recent push for privacy technologies & regulations, why web3 and blockchain is important to those innovating in privacy-tech, and what he and the Loki team are up to.

A video was posted demonstrating a testnet “Blink” transaction has surfaced. A Blink transaction is an instant cryptonote (private) transaction.

The Horizen team has now made their Zen Faucet available in Korean, Spanish and Malaysian — with additional languages to be added in the future.

Horizen CEO, Rob Viglione, was interviewed on The Tatiana Show and discussed recent breakthroughs in sidechain technology, including Scalability, Safety, Decentralization, and Software Development Kits. Rob also participated in the CryptoHub AMA.

A couple of in-depth reports were produced that covered the Horizen project, they were SimpleSwap and The Crypto Associate.

ZEN has been listed on FUDX exchange, added three new software engineers to their team, and reached 8 million ZEN in circulation.

Online cryptocurrency merchant, Cryptwerk, claims that XVG growth among merchants has grown 335% in 2019.

BBOD Exchange launched a Perpetual Futures Contract for XVG. Click here for more information.

XVG has been listed on both Altilly Exchange and Pionex Exchange this month.

The XVG team successfully hard-forked to V6 in December.

An update has been published on getmonero.org with a more user-friendly download page, a welcome video in Brazilian Portuguese, 5 new merchants accepting XMR and more.

XMR is now available on the Exodus Mobile wallet application.

Monero hit a couple of milestones during December, including the 2 million block milestone and hitting a new all-time high for hashrate.

ZCash foundation donated the equivalent of 40k USD in ZEC to the Canadian not-for-profit, Open Privacy, who work on permissionless privacy tools for everyone and anyone.

The team successfully upgraded to Blossom which will bring shorter block times by increasing the frequency of blocks, and updates were posted regarding the Zcash Foundation grants.

A new dashboard has been published to show shield statistics for Zcash transactions, the dashboard can be found here.

The first Zcoin Community Meeting was held, talked about Exodus Tokenization Platform, Promptpay Integration, Lelantus and Sigma, and more.

The Zcoin Crowdfunding System (ZCS) has been launched. The ZCS is a way for the community to propose ideas and request money, while utilizing the services of the Zcoin Core Team as an escrow. ZCS was forked from Monero’s CCS.

Coinbureau took an in-depth look into Zcoin, you can read about that here. Project lead, Reuben Yap, also participated in a Hummingbird AMA in December.

Zcoin has been added to PolisPay, Pionex, and SwapZone, plus you can also use XZC to purchase domain names on MadHouse Domains.

Buy domains using XZC on MadHouse Domains.

Dash announced the release of the new Dash platform on Evonet, their public testing environment for Evolution features. Here are some clips from the launch event, you can view them here.

Dash and Cryptobuyer announce partnership with Burger King in Venezuela. So far the point of sale system has only been rolled out in one store, but their intentions are for DASH acceptance in all 40 Venezuelan stores by the end of 2020.

Dash are hoping to make 2020 as good as 2019 was, where the number of active Dash wallets in Venezuela went from ~8,000 to ~40,000 wallets.

Dash Brazil has partnered with ATAR Payment Processor and Stratum exchange to enable Dash users to make purchases at over 2.5 million merchants in Brazil.

An open source GUI display to show the distribution of Grin nodes around the world. The map was developed by community member xbbgjj, and can be found here.

Grin had a successful hardfork in December on their testnet, Floonet, and so far everything is running smooth.

With Cuckatoo31+ rewards having reached 51%, Grin is now more ASIC friendly than ASIC resistant.

A detailed post was written in r/Bitcoin about Mimblewimble, Confidential Transactions, and Extension Blocks in the context of Bitcoin and the various trade-offs and challenges that are involved.

Bytecoin team released a project update to address some of the community concerns and provide an update on the current state of the project. If you are interested in reading the blog update, you can read it here.

It has been a tough year for the Bytecoin team and community, hopefully, 2020 is more fruitful.

VoskCoin released a video covering Beam, you can view the video here.

Beam’s Lead developer Valdok has co-signed “Confidential Assets on Mimblewimble”, an academic paper in collaboration with the Qtum Foundation and Peking University.

Beam launched their own Atomic Swap Marketplace, you can learn more about it here.

Beam has been added to NOWPayments, Bitfare, and GODEX Exchange.

Dusk have announced that they have started the release of their Sandbox Mainnet. With this release, Dusk are able to provide commercial partners access to our platform in a controlled environment.

The team have developed two new transaction models: Phoenix and Zedger. Phoenix is an industry-first to enable confidential spending of public outputs (it replaces the old UTXO/RingCT model within Dusk Network), and Zedger provides Phoenix with account-based capabilities.

Dusk produced a blog outlining why they created their new Merkle Tree Toolket, Kelvin, why it’s unique and why it’s relevant. You can read about it here.

Release of KELVIN. A Merkle Tree Toolkit, Library, and Backend created by Dusk Network. In this blog, we explain why we created Kelvin, why it’s unique & relevant. For code & Technical ReadMe check out our Github!