Overview:

Hexx (aka HexxCoin) has had a volatile past. It was originally launched as a crave fork in early 2015 but was abandoned by the developer. A new developer emerged in early 2017 and updated the code to a Zcoin fork. In May of last year, the developer abandoned the project and it was dead for nearly a half a year. In December 2017/January 2018, the community took over development of Hexx. The most recent BitcoinTalk ANN can be viewed here.

Website: https://hexxcoin.net/

Discord: Invite here

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HexxCoin/

Telegram: https://t.me/hexxcoin_official

Twitter: @hxxcoin

Algo: lyra2z330 (CPU mining, ASIC Resistant)

Max Supply: 9,999,999 (reached in about 20 years)

Current Circulation: 1,597,477

Top 100 Richlist: 77.36% of holdings

Pre-mine: None

Wallets: Desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux)

Exchanges: CryptoBridge and Cryptopia

Whitepaper: download it here (updated on April 15th, 2018)

Market Cap (on 4/16/18): $3,499,691/436 BTC

HXX price (on 4/16/18): $2.21/ 0.00027528 BTC

Additional Technical details:

Block Size: 4MB

Block Time: 2.5 minutes (576 blocks per day)

Difficulty Retargeting: BRNDF

Transaction Fee: 0.001 HXX

Current POW Reward: 2 HXX/block, 0.7 HXX to miners, 0.7 HXX to Xnode owners and 0.6 HXX to community funds and nodes.

Community Funds — accessed by democratic vote of members. In two years, the Community funds will be removed and the 0.6 HXX will be paid to stakers during POS phase. According to one of the developers, but not in the whitepaper, the community fund feel will soon be reduced to 0.1 HXX.

Xnodes Requirement (Masternodes): 2000 HXX

Current State & Roadmap:

Hexx is a fork of ZCoin utilizing the Zerocoin anonymity protocol, which is among the strongest privacy methods in the crypto industry. We started with the fact that HXX started as a fork of Crave, but was then later made a fork of ZCoin by the 2nd developer that picked up the project. The original objectives of the fork of ZCoin were to lighten the chain & remove the dev fees. The original lyra2z algorythm used by ZCoin could take days to sync, which can be extremely frustrating, the lyra2z330 deployed by HXX significantly reduced that time from 5–7 days to under 2 hours. In terms of Dev fees, the original fork had no dev fees — which meant more rewards for miners/xnodes. While not unique to HXX, the Lyra2z algorythm is CPU mining only at this time, which makes it effectively ASIC resistant. There are several larger servers that are mining HXX, which is the CPU mining equivalent of an ASIC, but those are much less widespread and less scalable — therefore amount to less risk than ASIC’s to the chain.

With the most recent relaunch of Hexx, the new team has added a community fee (aka dev fee) of 0.6 HXX per block, this means that everyday ~345 HXX (126,144 HXX annually) are added to the Community fund. This fund is scheduled to be reduced soon to 0.1 HXX/block, but there is no timeline for doing so. The Community fund is scheduled to entirely go away after two years. While the dev fees are somewhat high at this point (30%), it’s likely a positive sign for the community. At current prices, there is a very real amount of money being put into this coin to fund development, exchanges and marketing. It seems unlikely, at current prices, that the team would want to walk away from this project.

We’ll talk about this more during the comparison to Zoin later, but the inflation rate of 2 HXX per block, 1152 per day is the lowest we could find among other Zerocoin protocol coins. This ensures a steady future for HXX and a limited supply to allow for steady price gains — especially as more Xnodes come online and that supply essentially leaves circulation. Also, in terms of supply, there appears to be a significant amount of dead/forgotten coins in the current supply of ~1.6M HXX. Looking at the top 88 wallets or so that hold enough coins for a Xnode (2000 HXX), 37 of these wallets have had no activity for at least 200 days. These dead/forgotten coins amount to nearly 500,000 HXX, or about 1/3 of the total supply. This coupled with a low inflation rate likely points to an extremely quick price increase if volume gets behind HXX.

In terms of the base technology, Zerocoin has had some exploit issues as of late, but largely HXX has been spared. Here is a good article that is only a couple days old that talks about how ZCoin and Zoin have yet to fix the exploit.Talking with the Dev team on Discord, while HXX has yet to be exploited, they still plan on making an update soon.

Roadmap:

Cloud CPU Mining/Xnode Services

There isn’t much detail regarding these aspects on the whitepaper or on the website. Apparently they are not chain based applications, they are more partnerships that are closely aligned to the team. An example is ChainSilo, who is quite connected to the HXX team. Masternode services have been launched here, and this is what is being referred to via the roadmap. Typically roadmap goals are more aligned to aspects of the coin/underlying technology, and less about the launches of services by aligned partners…so take this as you will.

Bitcoin ZeroX

One of the more exciting parts of the Q3 roadmap will be a co-fork of Bitcoin which will be called Bitcoin ZeroX (BZX). Holders of both HXX and BTC will receive BZX in Q3 at a 1:1 basis. This means that if you have 1000 HXX now, after the co-fork, you’ll have 1000 HXX AND 1000 BZX. We’ve seen ZClassic (ZeroCash Protocol) launch Bitcoin Private and you can read about BTC2 here, which recently launched as a POS based Zerocoin protocol fork of Bitcoin. BTC2 has masternodes as well, so the claims via the whitepaper that BZX will be the first Zerocoin protocol coin with masternodes enabled is not necessarily true — but with the pace of coins launching, it’s hard to stay on top of these things. BTC2 essentially was created merely to be forked, HXX however has the time to be able to build up a strong foundation so that it can survive on a standalone basis after the fork.

POS Hybrid Implementation

If POS is rolled out alongside POW (POS Hybrid Implementation), it would be a relative first among the Zerocoin protocol coins that we looked into. PIVX is POS only and Zoin is POW and similar to the current setup of HXX. POS implementation was discussed by the 2nd dev before he left the project, so getting this done is easier said than done.

Bitcoin Private & the case study for Bitcoin ZeroX

Many are aware of the story of Bitcoin Private. It was a “co-fork” of both ZClassic (itself a fork of ZCash) and Bitcoin. Holders of ZCL and BTC both received BTCP on a 1:1 basis. Before the co-fork, ZCL was steadily trading at a marketcap of ~$3M. As the co-fork drew near, there was massive FOMO and the price pumped to a marketcap in excess of $600M. BTCP currently trades at ~$24 and ZCL still has a marketcap of ~$20M today.

ZCL PRICE ACTION LEADING UP TO CO-FORK

Selling ZCL at it’s highs before the fork would have left you with much stronger gains in the end — a classic case of traders buying the rumor and selling the news. The chances of HXX repeating this is fairly low, but there is a chance that anything with the “Bitcoin” name attached to it will inspire FOMO to the point of a massive pump.

Comparison vs Zoin

When looking at any Altcoin, it’s important to know if there are other coins that closely compare to the coin you’re looking to hold. In the case of HXX, there are several Zerocoin protocol coins out there that are similar in scope — namely Zoin (ZOI) and PIVX (PIVX). PIVX has a marketcap of $270M+, so it’s not really fair to compare it vs Hexx at this point in it’s ongoing development. The most immediate and relevant comparison is versus Zoin.

Main differences:

There are quite a few parts of this comparison that show room for upside potential for HXX. The marketcap of ZOI is nearly 6x larger than HXX and ZOI and ZOI is significantly less rare. This is not only due to there being 17M+ ZOI available, with a Masternode costing nearly $25k, it will be much harder for ZOI masternodes to be purchased, therefore more ZOI readily available. Also is the rate of inflation, currently more than 6x great than what HXX has — which continues to put downward pressure on the price of ZOI. Finally, while not as much of a concern, there is less of an “early mover” reward with ZOI. The supply is nearly 90% mined and even with a recent reward reduction from 50 ZOI per block to 12.5 ZOI per block (having every 210,000 blocks), ZOI will run out of coins in about 2 years.

While somewhat breaking news, ZOI is about to go through some sort of change in the coming months — it’s being referred to as the NIX platform. What this entails is still TBD, but right now the rumors are starting to begin.

What we like about HexxCoin

What drew us to analyze Hexx was a recommendation from a follower on Twitter who thought that HXX was significantly undervalued versus it’s competition. While this case was extremely strong when HXX was priced around $0.50 and you could buy an Xnode for ~$1,000, there is still ample proof that HXX continues to be undervalued versus its competition, based on qualitative analysis. The comparison versus Zoin, the fact that PIVX has a $286M marketcap and the pending co-fork launch of BZX all lead us to believe that there is significant upside potential in HXX as an investment. Crypto is not always rational though, DOGE and Verge continue to be top 35 coins…

The BitcoinZeroX launch really serves as a make or break moment for this new team and it will be interesting to see what the future will hold for both HXX and BZX after the co-fork. We advise our readers to watch the weeks leading up to the co-fork, much like the example of ZClassic/Bitcoin Private — the best time to sell may very well be before the co-fork. Knowing this, it may be possible to see a sizeable gain while not having the risk of waiting to see what happens after BZX goes live.

Lastly, we touched on this briefly in our discussion of the community fees, but we like that the dev team has skin in the game on this project. While admittingly a bit high at 30%, the dev fees generated should be significant enough to prevent the project from being abandoned anytime soon. This should help alleviate concerns of a potential “pump and dump” in the more immediate term and hopefully means positive short term news — such as new exchanges, marketing and further partnerships.

What we don’t like about HexxCoin

As we’ve detailed, as a fork it’s good to differentiate yourself from the original technology and look to improve upon it, so in the case of Hexx — improve upon ZCoin. The team has shown via the Zerocoin protocol exploits that they haven’t been as slow to react as ZCoin and Zoin, which is a solid position to be in as a dev coin. The part that we don’t like is that there isn’t much that HXX does that separates it from ZCoin. We’ve shown, comparable to forks like Zoin, it performs well — but there isn’t significant justification for the fork to have occurred.

Since HXX is is essentially a community takeover of an old coin, it’s important to understand the strength of this new team and if they are capable of achieving their stated objectives — or are they just whales that are hoping to pump and dump their long time holdings. The new team is very involved on both Telegram and Discord, and are happy to engage and answer questions and address FUD. This being said, there definitely has been some drama since the new team took over.

“WHAT HAPPENED: 2 team members proceeded in a way that already started to hurt HEXX, leaving us with no choice but to cut them out of the picture. With that we had to move to new Discord / Telegram channels and move the website to a new domain. WHAT DID NOT CHANGE: All points stated in the ROADMAP are and will be executed as promised! WHAT WILL CHANGE: Team structure / Team members / Team roles, we will take all actions to stop this kind of situation of ever happening again!” — post by shiki00 on 3/25/18 “What happened: There was a conflict of interest between the lead developer and core-team developer. This got out of hand extremely quickly and resulted in the core-team developer to get kicked out at a moment of madness. Two of the new-team developers who support the community massively let everyone know about the goings on and made sure everyone knew the situation (as we have extremely honest members in the team and we thank them for this — it would have been worse hiding everything from you). This of course led to FUD, sell ups and a huge drop on value per HXX. However, we are in recovery mode now and all is sorted and we are continuing to develop HEXX, market, communicate with companies and exchanges — this crypto is here to stay. Onwards and upwards.” Post on Medium on 4/16/18

These examples are only a couple weeks apart and it shows that this new team is experiencing some growing pains and trying to figure out it’s structure as it moves ahead. We’ll continue to monitor this, and while a risk, we don’t see this drama as a long term risk unless key developers leave the project. If this is the case, the BitcoinZeroX fork as well as other pieces of the roadmap may be at risk. The behavior is immature at best and we hope that these issues subside and the team continues to focus on development and marketing.

Verdict: Buy, pick strategic entry point.

This would be a very different story a couple weeks ago. When we started our analysis, the price was hovering around $0.50-$0.60 and was vastly undervalued vs other comparable coins (such as ZOI). Since April 5th, HXX has been pumping and reached a high of $6.73 on 4/9 — nearly 10x over the span of four days. Since these highs, the price has fallen steadily with no bottom in immediate sight — but it’s starting to even out and be less volatile. Couple this with the team related FUD, there is a chance that HXX could fall back into the pre-pump price range.

HXX hit a recent low of $1.09 on 4/15, there may continue to be other lower entry points in the days and weeks ahead. This could in the end though end up being wishful thinking, as awareness of HXX grows — but our recommendation is to watch the charts and pick a strategic entry point. The fundamentals are there, the team drama will ideally work itself out and especially leaving up to the BitcoinZeroX fork, there will likely be substantial increases in value.

We currently have no holdings of HXX and do not plan to initiate a position in the next 48 hours. This is not investment advice, continue to do your own research before buying/selling any coin. We hope that these insights and the associated links included will aid you in making an educated decision.

Sources:

https://www.hexxcoin.net/WP.pdf

https://medium.com/@hexxcoin

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/hxx/

https://zoinofficial.com/docs/Zoin-Whitepaper.pdf

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1671060.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2871452.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2958707.0;all

https://hxx-pool1.chainsilo.com/index.php?page=gettingstarted

https://steemit.com/pivx/@cryptowarrior88/pivx-and-zerocoin-protocol

Social Media: Twitter, Reddit, Telegram and Discord.