Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Seven Month Update

By Contrast Crypto on The Capital

For the One Month update, please click this link.

For the Two Month update, please click this link.

For the Three Month update, please click this link.

For the Four Month update, please click this link.

For the Fifth Month update, please click this link.

For the Sixth Month update, please click this link.

B̶i̶g̶g̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶G̶a̶i̶n̶ Smallest Loss

This month, Dash saw a roughly -22% decrease from $105.53 to $82.89

Biggest Loss

This month, Bytecoin saw a drop of about -54%, dropping from $73.57 to $33.89

Current Standings:

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

$DASH: Dash — Started at $100, last month was at $105.53 — is now $82.89 at (-22%) $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, last month was at $256.96 — is now $197.40 at (-23%) $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, last month was at $90.44 — is now $68.23 at (-25%) $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, last month was at $78.09 — is now $54.60 at (-31%) $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, last month was at $85.78 — is now $54.54 at (36%) $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, last month was at $107.36 — is now $69.14 at (-36%) $ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, last month was at $208.97 — is now $119.75 at (-43%) $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, last month was at $26.31 — is now $13.71 at (-48%) $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, last month was at $49.72 — is now $23.61 at (-53%) $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, last month was at $51.79 — is now $24.51 at (-53%) $BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, last month was at $73.57 — is now $33.89 at (-54%)

Interesting Notes:

March was a tough month across the board, with no gains posted by any coins during this period

Bytecoin went from the Biggest Gain in February to the Biggest Loss in March

25% of coins in the Battle of the Privacy Coins were halved in value in March

Our wildcard entrants are still holding up either end of the competition, with the Loki Network sitting in first place and the Dusk Network bringing it up the rear in eleventh

News & Updates

In order of overall standings…

LOKI

The Loki team seem to be publishing a lot of content across their social media accounts (Loki Twitter, Session Twitter, Loki Foundation Twitter). Some of which outline updates from the recent Valiant Vidar hardfork, you can check them out below:

The Valiant Vidar hardfork also brought with it a new version of Lokinet (0.7.0), also brings additional hops to Session’s message routing.

Loki CEO, Simon Harman, was interviewed on the DIVI Podcast where he discussed how the Loki ecosystem solves issues in privacy.

HASHR8 published an article about the Loki Project, outlining it’s accomplishments and objectives for the project.

Loki’s Weekly Dev Updates for March:

ZEN

The Horizen team put out a response to COVID-19, outlining that they will be:

Cancelling or postponing all in-person events through the end of April

Ensuring all employees work remotely from home for the remainder of March

Freezing new hires throughout March

Re-evaluating the 2020 budget plan, rolling out cost controls, and expanding new revenue opportunities that we have already been building

There’s a new release for Sphere by Horizen (V1.2.5beta), and it’s available for download. This new update intriduces the new Sign Message functionality making ownership of $ZEN address private keys verifiable.

Probit Exchange lists $ZEN, which is Horizen’s first ZEN/KRW trading pair.

Horizen Team Lead, Rob Viglione, was interviewed on the CryptoCoinShow, discussing how privacy plays an important role in the growth of the Horizen ecosystem

Rob was also interviewed by CryptoRich, discussing the current state of the project, and having a look at Bitcoin in the lead up to the Bitcoin halving which is due to occur in just under 6 weeks!

Looking to advance your blockchain knowledge? Why not stop by the Horizen Academy. It’s free and open to everyone who has the desire to learn more about these fascinating technologies. The Horizen Academy was created for the central purpose of sharing our knowledge and passion for blockchain technology and cryptocurrency with everyone regardless of their skill level on these subjects.

Horizen’s Community-Designed Merchandise is now live in the Horizen store. In case you forgot, last month Horizen ran a competition that asked community members to design some Horizen merchandise — these are the results.

Horizen’s Weekly Insider Podcasts for March:

DASH

HitBTC are hosting a $DASH trading competition. The competition has been running a little while now, but you can still enter! In other DASH/HitBTC news, ChainLocks have now been implemented for Dash at HitBTC.

New DASH markets:

New DASH releases:

DASH Wallet for Android — Altcoin Buzz covered this in their article

Dash Platform v0.11 — This release includes the ability to register public data contracts, DAPI for web browsers, and installation packages for Evonet and local development

Dash Core Updates for March:

Key takeaways:

Finalizde the designs for paying to a Blockchain User in the DashPay wallet

Isolated ST Parsing and Validation (3rd Part Contracts)

Released v6.0.0 of the Wallet-lib SDK

Key takeaways:

Released Dash Platform v0.11

Provided Distribution Package

Implement Key Management for Identitites/Contacts on DashPay for iOS

Started phased roll-out of the redesigned Dash Wallet for Android

Key takeaways:

Finished Create Username screen for DashPay Android

Redesign of Dash Wallet for Android is released

Implemented Basic Fee Calc & validateFee Function in DPP

Published the Register a Data Contract tutorial

ZEC

Due to the current restrictions on travel and gatherings, the Zcon2 2020 event has officially been cancelled.

A new update was released for the Shielded Zcash Guarda Wallet, you can read more about that here.

Zcash was added to a couple of instant swap cryptocurrency exchanges, they were:

Zcash was also added to the Blockchair blockchain explorer.

Electric Coin Company, the company behind Zcash development have released their Engineering Flight Plan, as well as their Q3 Transparency Report for 2019.

Key takeaways from the Transpareny Report were:

ECC operated close to break even in Q3 2019, as we received an average of $750,000 a month and realized approximately $744,600 in expenses. This includes employee incentive compensation paid in ZEC at the Q3 ZEC price of roughly $61.28 (the average ZEC daily closing coin price during the period)

At the end of Q3, the company held approximately $5.6M in USD and ZEC based on the September closing price of $38.72. ECC’s current holdings are approximately $4.2M in USD and ZEC

As a result of the market uncertainty, the company continues to tightly control spending in a number of areas including PR, trademark protections, engineering, event sponsorships and other non-critical activities

Introducing Heartwood, the next major Zcash network upgrade, improves interoperability through Flyclient support and gives miners the option to immediately shield mining rewards in coinbase transactions.

Looking to send some $ZEC on goods and services, why not have a look through the Pay With Zcash directory to see where you can use your $ZEC.

XMR

The Monero team posted updates to both the GUI (V0.15.0.4) and CLI (V0.15.0.5) wallets.

Monero Community recently funded Locha Mesh to support their efforts to build an off-grid cryptocurrency transaction solution. Check out the interview with Randy Brito of Locha Mesh.

Sarang Noether of the Monero Research Lab has written a paper outlining how Triptych-2 can be used in a confidential transaction model to provide faster total batch verification time than other state-of-the-art constructions without a trusted setup. Triptych is a logarithmic-sized ring signature scheme that would allow for significantly larger ring sizes (i.e. >= 128) whilst retaining efficient (with respect to both transaction size and verification performance) transactions.

Cake Wallet founder Vikrant Sharma was interviewed on the Girl Gone Crypto Podcast, they chat about Cake Wallet and its development roadmap, relations with the Monero team, and the future of adoption for privacy coins.

Fluffy Pony interviewed by MyCryptoSpirit, they discuss Monero, privacy, regulations, Tari, Magical Crypto Friends and more

2020 Monero Konferenco in Berlin has been cancelled. The community is considering an alternative event online and a more casual meetup in Berlin; however, details are yet to be finalized.

Revuo Monero for March:

MoneroTalk Episodes for March:

XVG

You can use $XVG at HighLifeGoods, a Los Angeles based smoking paraphernalia store.

Verge have entered into a marketing partnership with South Korean cryptocurrency project, Mecon Cash. This allows Verge to benefit from Mecon Cash’s sizable marketing resources, whil benefiting Mecon Cash with exposure to the global Verge community.

Quadancy has organiszed a trading competition for $XVG, between March 30th and April 5th. There’s a prize pool of over $10,000 to be shared between a total of 100 winners.

The Verge team were featured on a couple of podcasts this month, they were:

Verge’s Lead Developer, Justin Vendetta, was interviewed on the CryptoCoinShow, where he discussed privacy and the secret to developing a giant blockchain community

Mark Wittenberg from Verge’s Business Development team was interviewed on the Girl Gone Crypto Podcast, where he discussed Verge, XcelTrip, Paycent, and even a little mention of the Ellipal wallet.

It’s great to see how appreciative the Verge team are of businesses choosing to accept $XVG as a payment method. Here’s a few stores where you can use $XVG:

XZC

Here’s an update on Zcoin and how they are handling the recent market downturn, Zcoin development, and important decisions seeking community feedback.

For more information on Zcoin development, you can read their recently released Roadmap for 2020 and beyond. Some of the key takeaways were:

Privacy — Lelantus; Aura; Mixnets

Znodes — Deterministic masternodes; Long-lived masternode quorums; Chainlocks

Usability — Mobile wallets with private transaction support; Rich UI wallet; Instant sync clients

Zcoin have launched their Rich GUI Wallet (V1.0.5) that adds mnemonics and address book support.

Lots of interviews in March for Zcoin COO Reuban Yap, they were:

Explaining why privacy is important on the Survival Skills Podcast

Discussing financial censorship, online privacy and Zcoin on the Darkside of the Moon Podcast

Discussing how private Zcoin really is, how the new Zcoin Crowdfunding System works, the future of voting on the blockchain and more on BLOCKTV

Mr Yap also wrote an op-ed piece for CoinTelegraph on the promise and reality of blockchain’s role in global elections.

A couple of Zcoin overviews were published, outlining the Zcoin mission and technology stack. Read the Altcoin Buzz overview here, and the HASHR8 article here.

$XZC has been listed on WBF Exchange, you can read more about the listing here.

BCN

Is Bytecoin dead?

Bytecoin will remain a participant in the Battle of the Privacy Coins purely out of curiosity. How will a dead coin perform against the more active projects?

GRIN

Key takeaways:

A Grin wallet v3.1.1 patch release is around the corner

There is an ongoing debate on whether it makes sense to add more scheduled hard forks beyond those already in

New hires!

Grinscan now links transaction outputs and makes it easy for anyone to check degree of aggregation

Key takeaways:

The Grin wallet v3.1.1 patch is no longer around the corner, it’s ready to go

Funding requests approved

Study on network obfuscation challenges for Grin using Tor

Key takeaways:

Win prizes for running a node in a competition created by grinnode.live

New RFC draft for transaction building using QR codes and text blobs

There are thoughts around allowing duplicate outputs in order to facilitate payment channels

Key takeaways:

New hires!

Node patch v3.1.1 released

Governance debate on forum and keybase

Scope for v4.0.0 closes tomorrow

BEAM

It seems HASHR8 were quite busy this month. The team at HASR8 have done an overview of Beam, covering privacy-by-default, confidential assets, and more.

SimpleSwap have added $BEAM to their list of over 300 cryptocurrencies available for simple, hassle free exchange. The SimpleSwap have published an outline of the Beam project for the SimpleSwap community. If you’d like to take a read of that, you can do so here.

Key takeaways:

Testing continues for the upcoming Double Doppler 4.2 release

Their Atomic Swap API and Web Wallets are both in the testing phase

Hardware WalletRefactoring is in progress

Key takeaways:

Open-source pool software for Beam is on the way

Testing continues for Double Doppler 4.2, Atomic Swap API and Web Wallets

Key takeaways:

Atomic Swap API, Web Wallet, and Hardware Wallet Refactoring are complete!!

Key takeaways:

Due to the current situation, Beam are not planning or attending any upcoming offline events. All efforts will be focused towards online activities for the foreseeable future

DUSK

The Dusk Network is a very interesting privacy project. Unlike other projects in the Battle of the Privacy Coins, Dusk focus on security- compliance and relationships with financial institutions. Their innovative team discovered new ways to implement bulletproofs and zero-knowledge cryptography in places where it had not previously been used, which enables their technology to adhere to the stringent security requirements demanded by buyers and sellers of digital securities.

The Dusk team have written a blog outlining why their zero-knowledge framework and the components that go into Dusk’s privacy-preserving smart contract platform is one of the most powerful privacy-enabling blockchains in the world.

Interested how the Dusk Network functions? The team have a produced a handy demonstration video to show the transfer contract in action.

Key takeaways:

Dusk Network has recruited a PR-executive and a Marketing Strategist to help lead its online and offline marketing activities, as the company seeks to connect the global financial sector

Joining Dusk Network, Robin and Sabine will support the development of Dusk Network’s brand by creating and executing B2B2C marketing & sales marketing plans, and connect with large media outlets and journalists

Key takeaways:

The team has finalized the specification of Confidential Security Contract Standard 2.0 (XSC 2.0)

XSC 2.0 drastically expands on the functionality of the original, providing issuers with a much more customizable framework. The improved standard ships with a more granular control of contract governance, inter-contract interaction functionality (including whitelisting contracts), a revised dividend payout methodology and more

Dusk Network Enhancement Recommendation (DER) is a documentation standard for protocol enhancement proposals, that we are planning to make public soon. Our DER standard is inspired by Bitcoin’s BIP and Ethereum’s EIP

The Dusk team have implemented further improvements to the world’s first Rust-based PLONK implementation

Key takeaways:

The Dusk team have put policies in place that align with the safety precautions and messages of the Dutch government, to avoid additional and unnecessary contamination. Being a tech company, team members can quite easily access their tools remotely and will do so for the foreseeable future

Key takeaways:

PLONK gadgets will enable developers to easily build zero-knowledge circuits, used to program zero-knowledge smart contracts

Plug and Play: Smart Contract Interface to enable issuers to easily customize the featureset of their smart contract

Support conversion of ERC-20 and BEP-2 DUSK tokens to native DUSK

Updates requireing PLONG gadget implementation: