Battle of the Privacy Coins: Update

Week 1

Announcement

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

Biggest Gain

Loki Network saw a roughly +20% increase from $0.117653 to $0.141341.

Biggest Loss

Bytecoin saw a drop of roughly -12% from $0.00057694 to $0.00051040.

News

A Chinese Monero community have translated the Mastering Monero book into Chinese and is readying the book for publication. Monero is now accepted at Travala, which means you can now book hotels using Monero.

Reddit user fluffy_doggy posted a list of the Top 100 Richest Monero Addresses, with all data fields lacking values and simply showing a question mark.

Dash has had a great week in terms of adoption of currency from both merchants and ATMs. Dash’s recent partnership with IQ CashNow, a popular e-commerce platform, aims to bring the privacy coin to a much larger audience.

With now over 700 ATMs globally accepting Dash, it’s estimated that 1 in 10 cryptocurrency ATMs globally provides exposure to the Dash cryptocurrency.

Electric Coin Company announced to both the community and the Foundation that months of trademark negotiation with the Zcash Foundation had fallen through.

The Zcash Foundation awarded a bounty, totaling 1170 ZEC ($55,000) to ZecWallet’s light client project. A light wallet reduces the time it takes to download and sync to the blockchain, making it easier for newcomers to get started.

Bytecoin’s Zero Public Beta was released this week. Bytecoin Zero is a browser-based wallet for the Bytecoin platform — this allows users to access BCN straight from their browser without needing to open their desktop wallet, without any compromises to security.

Bytecoin Zero was designed with a few key concepts: zero trust operation, mobile-first approach, and adaptability.

It was a big week of Atomic Swaps for the Komodo team. Komodo Platform was able to facilitate the first privacy coin Atomic Swap between $KMD and $NIX.

Komodo’s AtomicDEX has gone live in, though it’s currently in Public Beta, and is available on Android and iOs. AtomicDEX is the world’s first native mobile decentralized exchange to facilitate asset agnostic Atomic Swaps.

This week Verge was added to the Bitnovo ecosystem, which means you can now buy Verge at over 30,000 stores in Europe. Verge Currency will also be added to the Ellipal hardware wallet in the near future too.

Verge has a new iOS wallet available, with added features like hiding balances and wallet sweeping. Verge University is progressing towards a functioning platform to educate the masses on the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and privacy.

Zcoin’s Lelantus paper, which focuses on recent development allowing the minimum number of Zerocoin spends required to be just one — down from five — was accepted to be presented at the Crypto Economics Security Conference.

Lelantus will also bring privacy by default to the Zcoin blockchain. Zcoin has realized that when privacy is opt-in, few people choose the additional privacy levels which may reduce the overall privacy of the network.

Team Beam successfully completed their Hard Fork to allow support for confidential assets, support for payment channels, PoW spam prevention methods, and a new minimum fee.

Several enhancements were made to wallets this week, as well as CLI+API, Laser Beam, Android, iOS and Linux applications.

Grin published their financial report for the Q2 2019, which saw their disposable funds increase by almost 7x — indicating the project operating purely off donations is in good financial health.

Binance Academy provided a nice explainer on MimbleWimble, the technology that powers Grin.

It has been busy for Horizen this week with the release of their Mini-node, which will bring Horizen one step closer to significantly enhancing the scalability and decentralization of the Horizen ecosystem.

Horizen Sidechains are being tested between multiple nodes. The team are excited about what the Mini-nodes and Sidechains have to offer. Horizen announced their weekly team meetings will be made public, and the Horizen Whitepaper has been translated into French.

Dusk has recently gone live with Whitepaper 2.0 and development is continuing on their zero-knowledge proof Virtual Machine.

Whitepaper 2.0 provides an in-depth overview of technologies deployed by Dusk Network protocols.

This week Loki has released a Public Chat feature for their decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging application, Loki Messenger, allowing large-scale moderated community conversations, similar to large Telegram channels.

A Loki Messenger Update and Loki News Feed have been added to the application, with support coming soon for user-created Feeds. You can also add a friend by scanning a QR code displayed in their Loki Messenger application.