Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Five Month Update

By Contrast Crypto on The Capital

For the original announcement post for the Battle of the Privacy Coins, please visit this link.

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.

Biggest Gain

This month, Dash saw a roughly +175% increase from $52.64 to $145.03

Biggest Loss

This month, Dusk saw a drop of about -9%, dropping from $32.49 to $29.65

Current Standings:

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

$DASH: Dash — Started at $100, last month was at $52.64 — is now $145.03 at (+175%) $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, last month was at $52.92 — is now $137.41 at (+159%) $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, last month was at $61.99 — is now $144.83 at (+133%) $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, last month was at $64.55 — is now $107.75 at (+67%) $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, last month was at $47.04 — is now $64.28 at (+36%) $ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, last month was at $178.93 — is now $215.19 at (+20%) $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, last month was at $51.98 — is now $61.54 at (+18%) $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, last month was at $78.39 — is now $92.05 at (+17%) $BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, last month was at $49.11 — is now $53.17 at (+8%) $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, last month was at $315.72 — is now $308.80 at (-2%) $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, last month was at $32.49 — is now $29.65 at (-9%)

Interesting Notes:

9 our of 11 coins had a green month in January.

The two wildcard entries were the worst performers in January, but still remain at the top and bottom of the rankings overall. Loki is up over 200%, while Dusk is down over 70%.

Dash went from being the worst performer in December to the best performer in January.

News & Updates

In order of overall standings…

The Loki Foundation was an official partner of 2020 Data Privacy Day, and a #PrivacyAware champion. Data Privacy Day is an international event that occurs every year on 28th January. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices.

Loki Community Round Table was held a couple of days ago. A handful of Loki project team members got together to answer a few questions about the project and its future; covering topics including the Session Messenger launch, Onion Routing, and more. You can view the Community Round Table video below:

The Loki team completed the first instant transaction, called Blink, with a CryptoNote coin. This feature is available across all wallets. You can watch the Blink CLI demonstration in the video below:

Last week was our final week of holidays, and a majority of the team is back into the office as of this week. However, some members of the development team did work over the break. Last week, these team members primarily focused on work related to the Loki Messenger rebrand to Session; the Loki team also deployed a few patches to the Loki Launcher and did some cleanup work on Lokinet.

The Nimble Nerthus hardfork was activated, which was successful in both moving Lokinet routers onto mainnet and enabling Blink on mainnet. The team are still monitoring the stability of both of these features and will release updates as needed. Progress has been made with the Session rebranding on both desktop and mobile, and Session is now very close to completion on both platforms.

Internal testing has now begun for the Session application, and a number of new features will be merged into the Session rebrand codebase over the coming weeks, including private group chats, proxy requests and Sealed Sender functionality.

Some issues presented within the network which resulted from the Lokinet routers coming online. The Lokinet 0.6.3 release was pushed to remedy the issue but was unsuccessful. Several solutions are being tested that will hopefully improve network performance in the next release.

Horizen hit several major project goals including reaching the Top 10 FCAS rated projects, released the Horizen Whitepaper 2.0 along with their Sidechain Alpha, welcomed many new community members, and increased community engagement by more than 180%.

Node hosting services, now is your chance to offer discounted node hosting to Horizen’s quickly expanding community! As a vetted node hosting company offering a community discount, you’ll be included in Horizen’s node hosting discount promotions via social media and email. You will be also listed on Horizen’s node hosting landing page alongside other node operators who offer community discounts.

If your company is interested in participating, please fill out the form in the link below.

Horizen recently added a Level Up feature on the Horizen Faucet, which allows you to earn extra rewards by authenticating your account with social media. The Horizen Faucet is developed to encourage people to learn more about Blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and Horizen.

The Verge team have been working with developers to improve the XVG block explorer website, and recently pushed a feature to see which miner mined past blocks.

To support the wildfires raging in Australia, Verge and ChangeNow have teamed up with to donate to support the Australian wildfires. Donations are going through the Manny Pacquiao Foundation, who are matching donations up to 1BTC.

Visit the link below to find out more information on how to donate.

CryptoBet announce that Verge are the 4th highest volume coin on their gambling platform. Verge has been listed on the EFIN DEX and Scavo. You can also travel the world with XVG on XcelTrip.

In this According to CoinMarketCap 2019 report, Verge is listed as one of the Top 5 privacy projects.

You can now download and test out the Electrum client, 4.0 alpha. Instant transactions, and no heavy blockchain download necessary. Soon, the XVG team plan on integrating Tor into the build.

Cake Wallet for Android is out now and also has a new website to go along with it. You can check those out below:

On Monero Talk, Riccardo Spagni talks Tari and Monero, plus Joel Gugger talks about XMR atomic swaps. You can watch the episode below:

Introducing Triptych, a logarithmic-sized ring signature scheme, new from Monero Research Lab researchers. Triptych could allow for significantly larger ring sizes in Monero with size and verification trade-offs comparable to current one ring signatures.

Take advantage of ultimate privacy on the Monero blockchain. The Exodus Monero $XMR wallet has you covered on your desktop computer and mobile phone.

XMR iOS

XMR Android

The highly anticipated Trezor hardware wallet integration of Monero is finally complete. The idea, popped in 2017, was developed by Dušan Klinec during 2018 and sent to the Monero team for review. The bug fixing is done, and the wait is over.

A new Monero community crowdfunding proposal has been submitted that will lead to off-grid #XMR transactions.

Monero community leader, Riccardo Spagni, speaks with CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen from the WEF in Davos about how companies are mainstreaming privacy.

A blog post was produced which should clarify some misunderstandings around Monero and supply auditability. Also applies to Confidential Transactions in Bitcoin.

The latest Monero network upgrade introduced a new impressive feature. RPC-Pay is an innovative way to incentivize server operators to earn Monero as an alternative to ad revenue. This has potential to be a revolutionary.

Just as HTTPS became standard on the public internet to protect credit card transactions, strong encryption will in time become standard on public blockchains to protect cryptocurrency transactions. Strong encryption is necessary to protect individuals, businesses, and nations on an increasingly hostile and invasive Internet.

Do you know about Zcash? It may just be the digital currency of choice for privacy-preservation and digital information security. Learn more in Zcash’s Introduction to $ZEC as part of their Building Blocks series:

Zero knowledge proofs are transforming blockchain privacy and scalability. You probably want to have some knowledge of cryptography before reading this piece by Starkware cofounder and Zcash founding scientist Eli Ben-Sasson.

Check out the video below to see the Electric Coin Company’s Q4 2019 Livestream:

The Ellipal hardware wallet now proudly supports ZEC cold storage and trading. Store $ZEC in the most secure air-gapped cold wallet with mobile support.

The for-profit entity working on Zcash, Electric Coin Company has published a software development kit (SDK) for both Android and iOS.

The Zcash Foundation is delighted to continue supporting the ZecWallet, an absolute cornerstone of the Zcash ecosystem.

Two separate security assessments have been completed on ZIPs that specify changes in the upcoming Zcash network upgrade, now named Heartwood.

ZIP 213: Shielded Coinbase and ZIP 221: FlyClient Zcash SPV were assessed for security by firms NCC Group and Trail of Bits.

Additionally, Trail of Bits produced some documentation helping to explain Sapling to newcomers, and NCC Group assessed the code implementation of the Blossom changes as part of their respective engagements.

Lastly, long time adviser, Gavin Andresen, stepped out of his formal role with the Electric Coin Company, he said, “ Working with Zooko and the Electric Coin Company team was a pleasure. Zcash is one of the few blockchains that I respect, because it is built by excellent engineers on top of the best privacy technology in the world.”

Zcoin v.13.8.10 is out with mnemonic seed phrase backup support, bug fixes, and UI improvements. This means instead of saving the file wallet.dat, you can backup your entire Zcoin wallet by writing down your 12 or 24-word seed phrase.

Bitay @BitayTurkiye, @HuobiGlobal‘s partner in Turkey has now added $XZC with Turkish Lira support.

Zcoin is enhancing privacy with their Receiver Address Privacy (RAP) feature, you can read more about it below:

Zcoin is pleased to announce that we will be listed on the Bitcoin.Com Exchange with 4 trading pairs. Trading opened between January 10 and 13 with a BTC, BCH, ETH and USDT markets.

We are pleased to further improve our partnership with Constant P2P to allow users to lock their Zcoin into Znodes when loaning through Constant. This allows for interest rates on loans using Zcoin as collateral to be as little as 3–4% APR

Zcoin, 2019 in review:

We are excited to share Zcoin’s development progress. Updates were seen on Core, Deterministic Masternodes, Lelantus, RAP (Reciever Address Privacy), Exodus Sigma, ZTM, Mobile App with Sigma, Rich GUI and much more.

Dash released their platform to Evonet, launched their documentation portal, implemented app store pictures in DashWallet iOS, implemented several updated screens in DashWallet Android, and implemented Dash.JS SDK. For more, check out the article below:

Demelza Hays to Join Dash Investment Foundation as Fund Manager, you can read the write up below:

Dash’s partner exchange WhiteBit has upgraded InstantSend transactions for their users — starting now, users can enjoy the fastest transactions, for immediate crediting of funds.

Backports done to keep DashCore in line with Bitcoin v0.16. Work has been done to allow developers to assign DPNS data triggers to DPNS contracts on Evonet. Designs completed for User Registration in DashPay iOS/Android for Evonet.

Dr. Darren Tapp was a special guest on Dash Podcast 137 to discuss security analysis of ChainLocks and economic incentives. You can watch the podcast below:

You can apply to the Dash Developer Program and access a fast-growing community of Dash Users Worldwide.

Electrum have implemented Dash PrivateSend now on testnet. You can see more about that below:

Dash awarded a top rating by Crypto Rating Council, ranking above Ethereum and Zcash.

Throughout 2019, $77 million worth of Grin was mined, making for an impressive first year. The old domain grin-tech.org has fallen into unknown hands.

DO NOT TRUST this site and for donation addresses to the General Fund ONLY USE THOSE LISTED IN THE GRIN-PM REPO.

A hard fork approaching, and meetings moved to Keybase, with an action to improve visibility of our Keybase community on the main website.

Grin successfully updated to v3.0.0 at block height #524,160. Grin Amsterdam teased with a follow up to their successful 2019 event, with a sponsorship confirmed by the Litecoin Foundation.

Grin forum has moved. The new address is: https://forum.grin.mw

Initial information and timelines for the scheduled v4.0.0 upgrade (in July 2020).

Bytecoin team released a project update late last year to address some of the community concerns and provide an update on the current state of the project. If you are interested in reading the blog update, you can read it here.

2019 was a tough year for the Bytecoin team and community, hopefully, 2020 is more fruitful.

Beam celebrated their first birthday, and shortly after their first halving. The Beam team have produced a blog explaining the halving, and some of its implications. You can read about that below:

Beam was reviewed by Vosk Coin, you can watch the video below:

Beam are launching CoinGecko Podcast for the new year! This year Bobby Ong & TM Lee will be interviewing thought leaders in the industry. For the first episode, Beam CEO, Alexander Zaidelson, and CTO, Alex Romanov, were interviewed by the CoinGecko team.

Check it out below:

Beam’s first halving (at block height #525,600) went flawlessly on Jan 4th, 2020. For the next four years, the block reward will be 50 Beam per block — 40 for the miners and 10 to the Treasury.

The Beam team are working on the 2020 roadmap — and expect it will be published soon.

Week 2, 2020

Alex Romanov recorded a new video talking about our plans for 2020 and we speak about Lelantus. More videos like that are expected in the future.

Week 3, 2020

Beam Weekly Development Update in video by Alex Romanov speaking of Double Doppler 4.2 Release including Beam Wallet channels using the Secure Bulletin Board System (SBBS), the API for Atomic Swaps and the Beam wallet ID.

There’s also an in depth look at the Beam Web Wallet and Trustless Wallet Service.

Week 4, 2020

Here’s an in depth look at the Beam Secure Bulletin Board System (SBBS).

December has been a monumental month for Dusk, as they have commenced the release of the Sandboxed Mainnet and shared some of the novel technologies being developed.

Part IV in Dusk’s Economic Model series has been published which discusses Sybil Attacks and the SBA consensus mechanism that secures the Dusk protocol.

Dusk are thrilled to announce that they have started the release of their Sandbox Mainnet. With this release they are able to provide commercial partners access to their platform in a controlled environment.

On January 29th, 2020, Dusk Network joined the BCNL Foundation in Berlin to discuss blockchain collaboration between Germany and the Netherlands.