Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Two Month Update

By Contrast Crypto on Altcoin Academy

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.

Biggest Gain

This month, Horizen, saw a roughly +42% increase from $73.22 to $104.46

Biggest Loss

This month, Beam saw a drop of roughly -32% from $77.88 to $52.28

Current Standings:

By percentage gain/loss between October 1st and November 1st…

$ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, last month was at $73.22 — is now at $104.46+ 42% $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, last month was at $71.25 — is now at $83.30 +17% $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, last month was at $78.59 — is now at $86.04 +9% $DASH: Dash — Started at $100, last month was at $88.43 — is now at $90.68 +2% $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, last month was at $84.72 — is now at $83.50 -1% $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, last month was at $45.49 — is now at $42.89 -6% $KMD: Komodo — Started at $100, last month was at $90.70 — is now at $84.97 -7% $BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, last month was at $72.91 — is now at $68.22 -7% $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, last month was at $309.38 — is now at $277.90 -10% $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, last month was at $96.52 — is now at $86.84 -10% $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, last month was at $75.14 — is now at $53.21 -31% $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, last month was at $77.88— is now at $52.28 -32%

Interesting Notes:

— More than half of the projects are down on price compared to last month, only $ZEN, $DASH, $XMR, and $XVG have finished this month in the green.

— $LOKI and $ZEN are the only projects to have increased in value overall since the beginning of the Battle of the Privacy Coins in September.

— The wildcards, $LOKI and $DUSK, remain in first and last place respectively.

— MimbleWimble coins $GRIN and $BEAM remain side by side, as they did in last month’s update.

— OKEx delisting of $DASH and $ZEC last month had little effect on the price, as both coins have increased in value this month.

News & Updates

In order of overall standings…

This month the Loki team announced they will be moving away from a hybrid Proof of Work and Proof of Stake system and implementing one that is entirely Proof of Stake.

A number of updates were released this month, which included voice messages, attachments, replies and mentions on Loki Messenger. Loki Network Service Nodes are now performing Checkpointing every four blocks, which means the Loki blockchain is essentially locked and unchangeable every eight minutes. Loki Name System development has begun, this will give people the ability to make custom .loki addresses.

Loki Project CEO, Simon Harman, was interviewed on the CryptoKreamers Podcast.

A Loki community member has also started development on a LokinetAP (access point), which will allow users to easily browse the internet anonymously via Lokinet.

Horizen released version 2.0 of their whitepaper, which will re-introduce Horizen project as a blockchain platform for fully customizable decentralized applications that can be hosted on Horizen’s network of over 30,000 nodes.

There have been major developments on Horizen’s sidechain alpha, that allows users to quickly and affordably create their own blockchains.

Horizen has also made upgrades to the $ZEN faucet, the Sphere application, and the Horizen platform — a revolutionary system of blockchains with decoupled consensus linked through common Cross Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP).

You can now buy $ZEN at $GBP and $EURO currencies at BC Bitcoin.

Dash are continuing to innovate and have announced a new DApp platform that will run on their masternode network.

$DASH usage is continuing to surge, seeing a reported 178% growth, annually, and this figure is not including coinbase and PrivateSend transactions. Active wallet addresses for $DASH have also surpassed active $LTC addresses.

$DASH is also the most used cryptocurrency in Latin America for the last three months on CryptoBuyer, and you can also donate with $DASH at UNICEF.

It’s really not a shock that $DASH is listed as the largest position in eToro and The TIE’s Twitter sentiment-based trading portfolio. Using an AI system, the trading portfolio monitors reportedly 850,000,000 tweets per day

BinanceUS has listed $DASH, and OKEx is reviewing its decision to delist.

Zcoin’s next-generation privacy protocol, Lelantus, has received some upgrades which enable direct, untraceable anonymous payments — hiding sender, recipient, and transaction amount. It will only show that a valid transaction has occurred.

The Exodus tokenization layer with Sigma support has been completed. This layer will enable anyone to create their own token with Sigma’s privacy features using Zcoin’s blockchain.

Zcoin has opened the doors to further merchant adoption. You can now use Zcoin via the PlusBit service.

Zcoin CIO, Reuban Yap, was interviewed on RT America and spoke of the importance of uncensorable, private money. Aram Jivarnyan presented at the Crypto Economics Security Conference at UC Berkley.

KYC-free trading has launched for $XMR on BTSE.

Monero’s CakeWallet has reached 20,000 installs on iOS, and Mastering Monero has sold more than 1,000 copies this year. Preliminary support for $XMR on BTCPayServer has been merged this month.

Monero Outreach is looking for feedback from merchants and customers about the Monero user experience. If you’re not familiar with Monero, Blokt has published a beginner’s guide to Monero.

A Monero community member has developed a tool that allows offline generation of Monero addresses and subaddresses, without the need to install core Monero software.

Komodo’s AtomicDEX has undergone a Halloween themed stress test, where users were able to swap between Rick’s and Morty’s. Komodo has also published an overview of the AtomicDex, which can be found here.

CoinCodeCap has published an analysis of the Komodo codebase.

Layer one of Komodo’s gaming SDK is near completion. The team is already using it to build games for tutorials and how to’s.

You can use $KMD to book travel accommodation via Travala, a one-stop travel booking platform that lets you choose from almost 2 million rooms in over 90,000 destinations.

OKEx is also reviewing their decision to delist Zcash, which was a nice 3rd birthday present for their community. $ZEC was also listed on BinanceUS. Bitcoin IRA will begin supporting Zcash lending.

The Zcash Foundation published a Cypherpunk Privacy reading list.

New Zecwallet-CLI v1.1 now supports encrypted wallets. This means you can encrypt your private keys on your disk/in memory, and use your view keys to receive incoming transactions.

Tails OS has started accepting $ZEC donations.

Verge has partnered with the Manny Pacquiao Foundation as the Foundation’s official digital currency. The Manny Pacquiao Foundation fights for those less fortunate around the world.

The Ellipal hardware wallet has announced $XVG compatibility, making it the first air-gapped $XVG wallet.

Verge has been added to the Atomic and Voyager applications.

Concerns have been surfacing from the Bytecoin community members regarding the communication, or lack of communication, between the Bytecoin team and the Bytecoin community.

The Bytecoin team has stated that they are currently in a research and development stage to assess the market and technology in order to develop a new roadmap. They see it as a key moment for the project and do not wish to rush any major decisions.

Even with the progress made with the Bytecoin Zero web wallet, the team recognizes the need to continue to improve their technology stack in order to remain a valuable market player — which may take some time to figure out.

In other news, you can now purchase account-free and anonymous VPS hosting with $BCN using the BitVPS service.

Grin’s website is up and running again.

$GRIN underwent a second security audit. If you’re after an in-depth look at the results, click this link.

Poloniex has donated a total of almost 4BTC to the Grin General Fund to help support the development of the open-source project.

The Grin team have merged transaction building over TOR hidden services, which should improve privacy during the transaction building process.

What do you have in mind for $GRIN next year? Submit your vision for the 2020 roadmap. Speaking of 2020, Innosilicon has recently announced delays for the ASIC miners, with the first batch now expected in 2020.

Beam’s website is now available in Chinese, Russian, Spanish and who bunch of other languages. This should help broaden the reach of the Beam project.

Beam’s lead developer, Valdok, talked about Lelantus-mw at the community ZKProof workshop in Amsterdam this month.

The Clear Cathode wallet saw an update for both iOS (v3.1) and Android (v3.2). The $BEAM team has now started the development of $BEAM’s new web wallet.

You can buy $BEAM with a credit card using the Indacoin exchange. $BEAM swaps are also available using the InstaSwap and SimpleSwap services.

$DUSK has been mentioned in BlockState’s Global Digital Securities Ecosystem study that was presented at the Hardfork Summit in Amsterdam. The study talks about redesigning the financial sector and getting rid of intermediaries/middlemen.

The Dusk Foundation released Part 2 in a new series that discusses the challenges and design choices that made the backbone of the Dusk Network protocol. Part 1 of the series can be found here.

Dusk cryptographer, Luke Pearson, has provided some thoughts after attending the ZKProof Community Event hosted by Deloitte and QEDIT this month. If you’re interested in reading what he had to say, you can here.