One of the best-kept secrets and one of the most anticipated coin launches is nearing. You probably wouldn’t be able to guess what we are talking about if you didn’t read the title. One big Twitter account with a large following mentioned it a while ago. Bitcointalk thread was posted in December 2018, but somehow it still flew under most people radars. Let’s explore the topic in this Zano coin review.

Privacy King

The main person responsible for the Zano project is known as crypto_zoidberg in crypto circles. He also seems to use Nicolas van Saberhagen as his pseudonym. His real name is Andrey N Sabelnikov. Check the Zano whitepaper for confirmation. The first two pseudonyms are variations of his real name and characters from Futurama series. Familiarize yourself with his pseudonyms so that you can follow the story more easily. With that out of the way, let’s explore the timeline of some of the remarkable things this Russian developer accomplished under his aliases.

Kelihos Botnet

Back in early 2012, Andrey N Sabelnikov was working for an Internet security firm Agnitum. Some might remember Agnitum as the parent company behind OutPost Antivirus. Agnitum has since been acquired by Yandex. But let’s get back to the point. During that time, Sabelnikov wrote the code which was later used to operate Kelihos botnet. The malware infected over 40,000 Windows computers and was capable of sending 4 billion spam messages per day. This clearly demonstrates the level of coding proficiency Sabelnikov possesses. It is important to note that Sabelnikov was never involved in any criminal activities.

Cryptonote Technology

It is well known that Monero is based on Cryptonote technology. See this GitHub license file and the name it references. Now guess who wrote and published original Cryptonote whitepaper back in October 2013? Yes, crypto_zoidberg appears to be the author who published the paper under his Nicolas van Saberhagen pseudonym. And this is more than speculation at this point; it has been confirmed from various sources, including this tweet from one of the Boolberry contributors. There was also a pretty solid hint in one Reddit post which will remain unlinked. However, we will never know about this for sure. Crypto_zoidberg’s work on Cryptonote is covered with a non-disclosure agreement. Hence he is unable to confirm or deny any speculations.

Ever since his work has been used as a base for countless other coins. More info and details about Cryptonote reference implementation can be found on CN homepage. All of the coins listed below, likely wouldn’t be possible without crypto_zoidberg’s contributions:

Boolbery

Boolberry is another crypto_zoidberg’s baby – the second fork of Bytecoin – the first production-ready Cryptonote implementation. It was a more refined and feature full than Monero but somehow missed the adoption boat and remained a low key coin throughout the years. Lack of marketing and proper funding were likely the root cause for the slow demise of Boolberry. But let’s get to the beginning. Boolberry mainnet was released in May 2014 after crypto_zoidberg, and his team spent a few months coding, testing and making everything ready for production. Everything looked great at the time; the price soared, the coin was listed on Poloniex and Bittrex… Boolberry team published a story that digs deeper into the project’s history; you can read it here.

Louisd’or

Enter Louisd’or. It was the codename for what we can now confirm is the Zano coin. The first thread was posted on Bitcointalk in late 2014. Brief details were provided, and many people got excited about the first Cryptonote based POS consensus system. But it seems the project faced some roadblocks. Hence silence commenced. We didn’t hear anything significant about it until Zano got announced.

Project Z

Shortly after the announcement of Louisd’or, crypto_zoidberg disappeared. Except for a few short updates, we didn’t hear much from him for about three years. But it wasn’t without a good reason. The years were spent silently working on the Zano coin. He and his team needed time and space to develop worthwhile Boolberry successor that was uncovered in December 2018. The funding and an expanded team that now also includes marketing experts has been secured. As of today, we don’t envision any major roadblocks towards successful Zano launch.

Zano Coin Review

What is Zano and why is it so interesting? Zano is a user-friendly privacy coin with a focus on e-commerce. Zano main features include:

Hybrid consensus model: Zano will use PoW + PoS consensus model. A mix of the two makes 51% attacks extremely difficult to orchestrate as the attacker would require 51% of network hashrate along with the 51% of the staked Zano supply.

Aliases: it is great that aliases are becoming a thing. We will be able to create and receive coins through our @MyAltcoins alias, no more impossible to remember public keys. It will be easier to setup and safer to use than on Boolberry.

Standard CryptoNote privacy features: stealth addresses + ring-signatures. Wallet balances are also hidden.

Encrypted Attachments: allows the storage of arbitrary data on the Zano blockchain. This data may or may not be permanent, thanks to the blockchain pruning. Another nice effect of blockchain pruning should allow Zano blockchain to be up to 80% smaller when compared to Bitcoin.

Asynchronous core architecture: increases scalability and allows multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously. While there are no public tests yet, we were told that Zano transaction throughput would be much faster than any other CryptoNote coin.

There are many more features; some are not announced yet.

Zano Discord server currently has 243 members, and Zano Twitter has 236 followers. We are really curious how will these numbers age. We guess that they won’t stay this low for much longer once the word gets out.

Zano Team

The team that stands behind the Zano is mostly the same crew that brought us Boolberry. There isn’t much information about them available so we won’t try to get into details. Zano is a privacy coin; hence it isn’t surprising that most of the team wishes to remain anonymous. There is one newcomer we want to talk about that joined Zano as a collaborator. He previously worked/works for Monero and is listed on their team page as one of the main developers. We are talking about anonimal. He was developing Kovri, the anonymous network that aims to provide an alternative to Tor. Currently, he seems to be focused on Sekreta and collaborating with Zano team. He might even bring Sekreta to Zano in the future; this is what he had to say on the matter: REDACTED. Update: it appears his contract with Monero is not yet completed. Hence he won’t be able to help much for another month or so.

Mining Algorithm

Initially, Zano was supposed to keep Wild Keccak with the addition of some improvements as its mining algorithm. Wild Keccak is known for its moderate power usage and efficiency. Cryptonight PoW calculation is between 30-100ms while Wild Keccak PoW is <1ms. It is also ASIC resistant. But it was never widely used. Only Boolberry and its fork called Purk used it. Some understandably argue that it was never properly tested under stress since Boolberry wasn’t widely adopted. It remained under the radar unlike other Cryptonight coins like Monero. There is also a lack of good open source GPU miners. This all seems to be the reason why crypto_zoidberg decided to ditch the WK2 implementation and replace it with ProgPOW. Ethereum is also planning to switch to this hash algorithm in the future. With the switch, Zano loses the unique algorithm feature WK provided. Time will tell if this was a good decision.

Coin Swap

Zano coin review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t talk about the swap. Boolberry owners will have an option to swap their coins for new Zano coins. Boolberry will continue to live and will be maintained as a classic POW coin. Some minor features from Zano will be ported over. The swapped coins will be burned, and thus Boolberry supply will decrease proportionally. The swap will be made in a 1:1 ratio. There is no final confirmation, but from what has been announced so far, Zano metrics should closely follow Boolberry. Maximum supply should be 18,400,000 coins. Another thing to note is that the swap won’t be forced in any way; users can choose to keep their Boolberry coins if they want to do so.

Conclusion

Given all the data presented, we believe that Zano is the next top privacy coin that has all predispositions to dethrone Monero eventually. There are a couple of possible concerns including crypto_zoidberg disappearing again or not delivering mainnet in the reasonable time frame. A security audit is also pending, but we aren’t concerned much about that given the credibility of Zano team. We hope you enjoyed reading our Zano coin review. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter.

MyAltcoins team,

Petar & Ana