Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Six 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.

For the Fifth Month update, please click this link.

Biggest Gain

This month, Bytecoin saw a roughly +46% increase from $53.17 to $73.57

Biggest Loss

This month, Dusk saw a drop of about -38%, dropping from $137.41 to $85.78

Current Standings:

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

$BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, last month was at $53.17 — is now $73.57 at (+46%) $ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, last month was at $215.19 — is now $208.97 at (-3%) $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, last month was at $29.65 — is now $26.31 at (-12%) $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, last month was at $92.05 — is now $78.09 at (-15%) $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, last month was at $61.54 — is now $51.79 at (-16%) $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, last month was at $107.75 — is now $90.44 at (-16%) $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, last month was at $308.80 — is now $256.96 at (-17%) $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, last month was at $64.28 — is now $49.72 at (-23%) $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, last month was at $144.83 — is now $107.36 at (-26%) $DASH: Dash — Started at $100, last month was at $145.03 — is now $105.53 at (-28%) $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, last month was at $137.41 — is now $85.78 at (-38%)

Interesting Notes:

Bytecoin, without posting an update in 2020, saw a 46% gain over February — and was the ONLY coin on the list this month that was in the green.

News & Updates

In order of overall standings…

Now, you can run a Service Node totally within the Loki ecosystem thanks to EvoHosting. Stake $LOKI to run a Service Node, receive $LOKI rewards, spend them on a VPS.

The CryptoKreamers have produced a video outlining How To Set Up A Loki Service Node.

CEO Simon Harman presented at Pause Fest, giving the inside word on technologies, problems and solutions for secure messaging software. Simon was also interviewed by MiningStore, and you can watch that video here.

Loki’s secure messaging application, Session was finally released across iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. We covered this briefly last week. This is a great article that explains why Session needs a blockchain, and why it had to be the Loki Network.

In other Session news, the whitepaper was finally released. If you’re interested in 30+ page technical documents, why not try to give the Session Whitepaper a read, you can do so here.

Loki were Champions of Safer Internet Day 2020, an eSafety initiative supported by the Australian Government.

The Loki Foundation has opened LRC-6 to restructure the $LOKI block reward. They have proposed an initial restructure of 66% to the Service Nodes, 24% to the Miners and 10% to the Loki Foundation — this would take place in an upcoming hard fork. They have then scheduled a second restructure of the block reward which would remove Miners entirely, leaving 90% of the block reward to Service Nodes, and 10% to the Loki Foundation to continue funding development on the project.

Work continues on Lokinet 0.7.0 changes and commenced building out the parts necessary for some incremental post-launch updates to Session.

Loki have been collecting user feedback over the past few days and have compiled a list of bugs that are now being working through.

The Loki Core team merged the first parts of LNS, which is slated for release in about a month. The Lokinet team continued working on Lokinet 0.7.0, with the aim that 0.7.0 will be ready in time for the aforementioned Loki Core release.

The Lokinet team started to focus on some final issues found with path handovers, in the leadup to Lokinet 0.7.0.

Horizen are looking for new merchandise designs. The winner will have their design featured on the Horizen store, receive a t-shirt with their design on it, and will earn all proceeds from the sale of their design.

Entries close March 15th — More information below:

Horizen believe in transparency and value community involvement. Horizen broadcasts a quarterly live stream on YouTube and hosts weekly live team calls on Discord to keep the community update to date on project progression. As part of the live stream and weekly team call, the team also holds a live Q&A session.

You can view the Update and Q&A below:

Horizen Sidechain Extended Whitepaper: Zendoo

A zk-SNARK verifiable cross-chain transfer protocol, enabling decoupled and decentralized sidechains. A universal construction for Bitcoin-like blockchain systems that allows the creation and communication with sidechains of different types without knowing their internal structure.

More information below:

New features to the $ZEN Faucet include:

New login and registration support for Twitter and LinkedIn

We adjusted the bonus round reward to reflect your social multiplier

We’ve added WhatsApp contact information to the Faucet page

We’ve re-designed the menu bar for easier navigation

We’ve re-adjusted our social multiplier to (0.2x, 1x, 1.2x, 1.9x). This is still a huge increase in rewards for users who authenticate their accounts via social media.

The latest Sphere by Horizen update improves the functionality and usability of their flagship application. For more information, check the link below:

The Verge marketing team has expanded, talking on two new hires for 2020. The Verge team have also updated to ZenDesk to improve customer support responses. Did you see Verge on a Nascar recently?

More on this in the marketing update below:

Verge are also running a merchandise design competition. Winners will receive one free item from the Verge Store, plus their own design when that product is made. More information here.

Binance added instant conversion swaps for $XVG and 8 other coins. They’re not privacy coins so we won’t mention them directly, but if you’re interested, you can view the full list here.

Pull Request submitted for $XVG compatability on the Trezor hardware wallet, via Electrum. More info on that here. It’s good to note that they’re also still waiting on Ledger integration, since 2018.

Announcing the 2020 Monero Konferenco in Berlin on June 13–14th. If you’re interested in taking part, whether as a guest or as a presenter, you can find more information on the event here.

Canadian no-fee cryptocurrency exchange, Newton, has listed the country’s only XMR/USDT pairing. Click here for more information.

OKEx now support XMR/USDT and XMR/BTC spot margin trading. Margin trading can be quite risky, so this should only be for those who know what they’re doing.

Monero is about to implement Dandelion++. A technology that will enhance Monero’s privacy at the network level, making much harder for an attacker to link a transaction to a specific node. While currently in the testnet phase, it’s prime for testing to ensure all features work as promised. If you are interested in playing with Dandelion++ on testnet, please check out this informative Reddit post about how to get set up.

Thanks to a grant from the Zcash Foundation, Zecwallet’s lightwallet server is now bigger, caching ALL blocks, and is improving sync performance for lightclients.

Coinbase Pro has added $ZEC to their ever expanding list of assets. Coinbase Pro is very limited in terms of the privacy projects they list, so here’s hoping this is the start of a new trend.

Under ZIP 1014, Zcash issuance for the next four years after the halvening will go 80% to miners, 5% to the Zcash Foundation for core support functions, 7% to the Electric Coin Company for core support functions, and 8% for “Major Grants” to support independent third parties to improve Zcash.

Electric Coin Company will open source its shielded mobile wallet code — both for Android and iOS — in Q2. Payment-first design, newbie-friendly, super fast and Z2Z ready.

Big month for exchange listings in camp Zcoin:

$USDT pair on BiKi

$USDC & $BTC pairs on Oodlebit

$USDT pair on BKEX

Zcoin’s $XZC liquidity partner Hummingbot has launched their Liquidity Mining Open Beta! This is an important step toward the goal of making Zcoin’s market making open, transparent and efficient!

You can use $XZC to buy advertising services from Adshares, $XZC is now also supported on the Midas Protocol wallet, and PolisNodes are supporting $XZC too.

The Zcoin Crowdfunding System is a way for the $XZC community to debate and fund Zcoin initiatives that they want to see in the Zcoin project. In this update from Sandra, we are shown the current ZCS items and successfully funded initiatives.

There was a big Zcoin Dev Update released, covering Core Upgrades and Deterministic Masternodes, Lelantus, Receiver Address Privacy, Elysium Sigma and ZTM, Mobile App with Sigma, Rich GUI, as well as PoW and ProgPOW/MTP Discussion. More on that below:

Dash and Hyperledger have teamed up to support the Electric Vehicle ecosystem:

A local EV charging ecosystem can leverage Hyperledger Fabric to mediate agreements between EV owner, storage operator and EV charging stations operator, as well as generate and transfer ownership of tokenized energy assets

Outside the local EV charging ecosystem, Dash’s public blockchain can be leveraged to store and share proof of ownership over the tokenized energy assets

February was a good month for DASH exchange listing:

Binance Futures launched a DASH/USDT perpetual contract with up to 50x leverage

Huobi adds a DASH/HUSD spot trading pair

Biki add a DASH/USDT pair

Crypto Adoption on the rise, Dash’s Android wallet usage surges 627% in Venezuela.

Dash were featured on the following podcasts in February:

Dash CEO, Ryan Taylor, was on the Untold Stories podcast with Charlie Shrem

Learn more about Dash on the What Is Crypto podcast

Dash partned with Simplex to enable DASH purchases with a credit card, you will also be able to purchase DASH with a bank card very soon, via Atomic Wallet.

The Dash team made a few PrivateSend changes to improve privacy, identified sources of some unstable DAPI connections on Evonet, finalized DashPay designs for the contacts and notification features.

There were some UI upgrades to the Dash Core Desktop wallet, mempool syncing improvements, PrivateSend improvements and more.

The team ‍released DashCore v0.15, began beta testing the redesigned Dash wallet for Android. They also added resource monitoring for Evonet, and made progress in providing secure validation for state transitions for Evonet. More on that here.

The Grin-wallet User Guide has been updated to include the v3.0.0 release — you can also find a bunch of helpful guides at the above link. Daniel Lehnberg from the Grin team was interviewed by Apollo Capital.

Grin’s 2020 Roadmap was open for discussion; however, this discussion was closed by February 25.

In terms of development, Grin member Yeastplume has made a number of development updates which can be found here, and here.

Grin-wallet v3.1.0 beta binaries have been released. Links can be found at the link below:

Bytecoin have not posted on their Twitter account in 2020, nor have there been any blog posts.

SoloPool added Beam. Solo mining pool is a mining pool configured in such a way that each miner works independently of the others. The block reward goes to only the miner who found it, others do not get anything.

The Beam team released Double Doppler v4.0 on Android. The new Beam Tutorial series has kicked off, and the first episode is How Beam Works.

The Beam Foundation unveiled their 2020 Roadmap, which will include upcoming Double Doppler releases, a hardfork to change the PoW algorithm, confidential asset infrastructure, Lelantus and more.

Beam included in FTX’s PRIV token, which indexes BEAM and another seven privacy coins. Beam’s roadmap has been translated to Spanish and Chinese.

The Beam team had a couple of AMAs, the first was Beam Business Lead, Alexander Zaidelson, on The AMA Room. The second was Beam Tech Lead, Alex Romanov, with Huobi Nigeria.

Beam Product Lead, Sasha Abramovich, walks us through the mobile wallet UX and what makes it so special.

The Dusk team have completed the first iteration of their PLONK implementation. They have also released two internal developer demos.

Dusk will tokenize shares for thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises via a new partnership with shareholder registry Firm24.