Exclusive PIVX Zerocoin Features

PIVX has pioneered several enhancements to Zerocoin to create the most advanced implementation on the market. The following features were created by PIVX and are only available with PIVX or recent forks of PIVX code.

zPoS

In May 2018, PIVX released zPoS (Zerocoin Proof of Stake) which is the only private staking system in crypto. It incentivizes the use of privacy and helped PIVX attain the highest percentage of private supply of any ZK privacy-based coin. This is what a zPoS reward looks like on the block explorer

dzPIV

Those zPIV you got in Step 1 are saved in your local wallet.dat, completely off the blockchain, how’s that for privacy? In most Zerocoin systems, this means you need to make new backups of your wallet.dat after every mint, which is a huge hassle and easy to screw up. PIVX is not most Zerocoin implementations. PIVX is the only coin to offer one-time seed backups with a feature called dzPIV (deterministic zPIV).

ezPIV

You encrypted your wallet.dat file like you were supposed to right? You might be surprised to learn most Zerocoin coins do not protect your zPIV with this encryption, so anyone who can get a hold of your wallet.dat file can get your zerocoins even if the wallet.dat is encrypted. PIVX is the only coin to encrypt your zPIV and protect them with it’s ezPIV feature (encrypted zPIV).

Automint

There’s only 3 steps in the process, but PIVX takes care of the first of the first 2 automatically for you. The PIVX automint will automatically mint 10% of your piv to zPIV. This percentage is configurable from 0 to 100, but it’s a nice way to make sure you’ve always got private coins ready to spend.

The Smallest Spend Sizes

A drawback to many privacy mechanisms is large transaction sizes, with Zerocoin being the largest at 25kb. Compared to Bitcoin’s ~266 bytes per transactions this is quite large. PIVX launched their Zerocoin protocol with 20% smaller spend sizes, which means less blockchain bloat, lower fees, and shorter sync time. Author of Bulletproof technology Jonathan Bootle has joined the PIVX team and expects to be able to reduce this another 90% to about 1kb.

The First to Allow Fractional Spends

It was not previously possible to spend part of a zerocoin, but PIVX allows you to spend zPIV and get your change back.

The First to Spend to 3rd Parties

The original Zerocoin protocol had you spend your zerocoins back to your own wallet before sending them to the destination. When PIVX launched Zerocoin in August, 2017, it allowed spends directly to any destination address for the first time. ZCoin also has this capability as of June 3rd, 2018.