Privacy Focused Cryptocurrency Projects

It’s estimated that there are 63 different privacy coins available for trading on the cryptocurrency market today. These projects are worth just over $2 billion combined. While each project undoubtedly tries to offer the best approach to privacy as possible, the reality is, five projects dominate. They include:

Monero

Dash

Zcash

Verge

Bitcoin Private

Monero is by far the most popular privacy coin in the world. Nearly every incident involving a headline-grabbing hack sees criminals taking their proceeds in Monero tokens. The project makes transactions unlinkable and untraceable using ring signatures and stealth addresses. This hides the identities of both the sender and receiver. The amount being transferred between two users is also hidden using Ring Confidential Transactions. Monero is by far the most proven and trusted privacy coin on the market today, which is why it’s the most valuable token in the category by market capitalization. The project is currently worth $1.13 billion.

Dash is actually a fork of the original Bitcoin code, like many other altcoins. The meaning of the name is simple. It’s a simple combination of the words digital and cash. Dash launched in January of 2014 and is widely considered the first-ever privacy coin in the history of cryptocurrency. Its first-mover advantage in the category isn’t the only reason Dash is a $640 million project. Its anonymization strategy revolves around something called PrivateSend. PrivateSend hides transactions by mixing them together and introducing them to the blockchain as one single transaction.

For example, three separate transactions from A to D, C to F, and G to Y could appear on the blockchain as ADCFGY. In other words, it’s simply a string of characters that seem to represent one transaction.

It’s been said that Zcash uses a concept called Zero-Knowledge Proof, a cryptographic tool that allows users to transact between each other without anyone revealing their own address to anyone else. Users have the ability to hide or grant access to their addresses as they wish, which gives them greater control. Other projects don’t necessarily provide that function.

Transactions on the Zcash network are verified using zk-SNARKS. That stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. All blockchains use a non-interactive method of proof because transactions have to be verifiable by every node on the network. It’s virtually impossible to allow all parties to interact on a decentralized blockchain while also maintaining anonymity. Non-interaction is key.

Verge is a privacy coin that is built for everyday use. This open-source volunteer-driven project is providing a fast, efficient and decentralized way of making direct transactions while maintaining privacy. Verge uses multiple anonymity-centric networks such as TOR and I2P. TOR transfers user communications to a distributed network run by volunteers. I2P encrypts the data before it gets sent through. The IP addresses of the users are fully obfuscated and transactions are completely untraceable.

Bitcoin Private is really a product of two different projects merging together Bitcoin and Zclassic (which itself is a fork of the Zcash code). Like many other tokens that use Bitcoin’s name, Bitcoin Private boasts a strong following who like Bitcoin’s original coding structure but wanted to make a specific aspect of its features better. BTCP supports zk-SNARKS as a method of proving transactions, has a large block size of 2MB and faster block times of two and a half minutes.