Battle Of The Privacy Coins: One Month Update
By Contrast Crypto on Altcoin Academy
For the original announcement post for the Battle of the Privacy Coins, please visit this link.
Biggest Gain
Loki Network saw a roughly +200% increase from $100 to $309.38.
Biggest Loss
Dusk saw a drop of roughly -55% from $100 to $45.49.
Current Standings:
- $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, now at $309.38
- $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, now at $96.52 (-3.5%)
- $KMD: Komodo — Started at $100, now at $90.70 (-10%)
- $DASH: Dash — Started at $100, now at $88.43 (-12%)
- $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, now at $84.72 (-15%)
- $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, now at $78.59 (-22%)
- $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, now at $77.88 (-23%)
- $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, now at $75.14 (-25%)
- $ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, now at $73.22 (-27%)
- $BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, now at $72.91 (-28%)
- $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, now at $71.25(-29%)
- $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, now at $45.49 (-55%)
Interesting Notes:
— Our wildcards are behaving just as wildcards should: $LOKI is in the first place, and $DUSK is in the last place.
— $LOKI is the only coin in the Privacy Battle that has outperformed both BTC and USD markets, sitting firmly in the green for both.
— Loki, a Monero fork, is outperforming Monero, a Bytecoin fork, which is outperforming Bytecoin. Is this a sign that the market is looking for innovation?
— Grin’s website (https://grin-tech.org/) was down a couple of days ago, but their ‘blockchain’ is still alive and well.
News & Updates
Loki Network —
Loki released a paper earlier this month on a potential upgrade to a fully Proof of Stake consensus, suggesting the removal of miners in favor of a system where Service Nodes produce blocks, order transactions, and secure the blockchain.
Service Node checkpointing is now being enforced on the Loki testnet, and the Loki team are looking for bugs to be squashed. There is a prize pool of 4000 $LOKI up for grabs.
Loki’s blockchain-based, encrypted messaging application has seen some additional features implemented over the last month, including: message replies, markdown formatting, link previews, conversation search, moderator tags, and RSS feeds.
In other news, the Quorum Net to facilitate Loki’s Blink transactions is under development. Lokinet developers are also set to conduct their weekly developer meetings using voice chat over Lokinet for the first time.
Zcoin —
Zcoin’s Lelantus paper has been selected for the 2019 Crypto Economics Security Conference at the University of California (Berkely Campus) in October — to be presented by Aram Jibanyan.
Lelantus is Zcoin’s next-generation privacy protocol, which ensures both transaction confidentiality and anonymity with small proof sizes, short verification times, and without requiring a trusted setup. Lelantus proof sizes are almost 17 times smaller than the original Zerocoin proof sizes.
Zcoin partners with Travala.com, a one-stop travel booking platform that lets you choose from almost 2 million rooms in over 90,000 destinations.
Komodo —
Komodo released a blog post outlining the four core requirements that must be satisfied in order for an exchange to qualify as a decentralized exchange (DEX). The post explains how Komodo’s third-generation atomic swap powered DEX is the only exchange in the industry that satisfies all four core requirements.
In an effort to build a stronger community, Komodo has announced several adjustments to improve their community experience and increase engagement, including: community guidelines, a community moderator program, and a community bounty program.
Komodo is now trading on Liquid Exchange.
Using Komodo’s Antara Composer web application, you can customize and launch a Smart Chain in minutes, and add all the extra features you need to go to market quickly — including a listing on the AtomicDEX. Additionally, you can choose to protect your Smart Chain with the power of the Bitcoin hash rate using Komodo’s delayed Proof of Work security.
Dash —
Dash was listed on Coinbase Pro earlier this month, and then on Coinbase within a week. Could this be due to DASH’s high merchant adoption? Unfortunately, $DASH was delisted from both OKEx and UpBit this month, but it’s not all bad news! Dash has been added to the list of available coins to margin trade on Binance.
The Dash Investment Foundation website went live this month. The Dash Investment Foundation makes Dash-denominated business loans and equity investments within the blockchain, payments, and consumer technology sectors.
Chain Analysis shows Dash’s InstantSend transactions are settled in at under 2 seconds on average.
Dash has been quite popular in Venezuela due to the hyperinflation of the Bolivares, the local Venezuelan currency. DashText has been a popular transaction method in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
Dash has been integrated with the SafePal hardware wallet, the first hardware wallet backed by Binance Labs.
Zcash —
Electric Coin Company has announced a new technique for creating practical, scalable and trustless cryptographic proving systems. The concept is proof that verifies the correctness of another instance of itself, allowing any amount of computational effort and data to produce a short proof that can be checked quickly.
Zcash added to VegaWallet, which has built-in multi-signature wallet features, a point of sale terminal, and the ability to exchange cryptocurrencies within the wallet application.
In exchange news, $ZEC was added to Binance lending, with margin trading markets now available for trading. Unfortunately, $ZEC was delisted from both OKEx and UpBit this month.
Monero —
This month Monero was accepted as a usable currency for donations at the Linux Mint Project, which is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions, and used by millions of people. The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.
A code freeze will be initiated on October 24th in preparation for the 0.15 release scheduled for October 31st, and a network upgrades on November 30th.
RandomX has been successfully audited by four separate independent audit teams.
Monero’s inflation rate dropped below Bitcoin’s current inflation rate, though Bitcoin’s inflation rate will drop below Monero’s once again during the Bitcoin halving in May 2020, when Bitcoin’s inflation rate will be lower than that of Gold.
In exchange news, $XMR was added to Binance lending, with margin trading markets now available for trading. Though unfortunately, $XMR was delisted from both OKEx and UpBit this month.
Beam —
Beam is now listed on the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, and open for trading in the BTC, USDT and BNB markets. Binance has also published its Beam research report.
As a way of showing appreciation to Beam community members that take their passion to the next level, Beam has revamped their ambassador program to increase the collaborative impact they have within the cryptocurrency community.
Beam has posted a blog highlighting some of the evolutionary changes their website has gone through, with the first iteration holding many similarities to the Harry Potter branding — but as a tech company, they were never into pushing witchcraft and wizardry.
In the past couple of months, the Beam team has spent considerable time researching the implementation of the Lelantus protocol, developed by the Zcoin team. The proof of concept implementation of the MimbleWimble Lelantus can be found here.
Grin —
Grin announced its new security-focused repository to keep track of keys, incidents, audits, canaries, and more.
Details and photos of what is believed to be the Avalon Grin G1 ASIC miner have been released, which is allegedly due on the market by the end of October.
Ironbelly, currently in the mainnet beta testing phase, has launched on Android.
Horizen —
Horizen held a competition to help pick a theme for their upcoming software releases. The theme had to relate in some way to celestial objects. Four lucky winners received $30 worth of $ZEN and a Horizen t-shirt of their choice.
The Horizen team has shifted their Monthly Live Streams to a Quarterly Update. They’re hoping this will enable the team to deliver more in-depth information to the Horizen community.
$ZEN is compatible with Ledger hardware wallets — this time via the Magnum Wallet interface (in addition to the Horizen application). This means you can now store your $ZEN offline (though without the shielded payments).
Further development has been made on Horizen sidechains, which will employ a unique synchronization method that allows sidechain networks to follow the history of the main chain — this will be done in a way that will only extract information related to one particular sidechain.
Bytecoin —
Bytecoin Zero beta testing is underway. If you’re not sure what Bytecoin Zero is, it’s Bytecoin’s new browser wallet which they are claiming is as secure as their desktop wallet. It will allow users to open their Bytecoin wallet in their browser, and send and receive their $BCN without having to install software or download a local copy of the blockchain. It’ll be interesting to see the results of the testing phase.
Due to this release, the Bytecoin team has been forced to reconsider their product vision and priorities. The team has decided to focus their efforts largely on the development of Bytecoin Zero, which may impact the delivery timeline for other projects mentioned in their March roadmap.
Verge —
The Verge team has talked about implementing mandatory stealth addresses. This marks a push towards standard addresses becoming opt-in.
In other development news, Verge are tossing up whether to add Ring Signatures or Dandelion++ as additional methods of obfuscation.
$XVG is accepted by NOWPayments — a no-fee, custody-free online cryptocurrency payment service. Additionally, $XVG can now also be stored in the Guarda Wallet.
Dusk Network —
Dusk has been added to Fantom’s BNB Bridge, which enables users to convert $DUSK between ERC20 and BEP2 standards. Fantom created the BNB Bridge to increase interoperability between the Ethereum and Binance blockchains. DUSK is the third project to be added to the Bridge, which will facilitate transfers between the ERC20 and BEP2 standards, and back.
Development continues on the Dusk Virtual Machine, with an emphasis on the flexibility of functionality in relation to zero-knowledge proof verification.
Whitepaper 2.0 has been published. It provides an in-depth overview of the technologies utilized by the Dusk Network without overwhelming the less tech-literate readers.
Dusk will make the creation and transfer of securities a trustless experience via its decentralized and regulatory compliant global securities ledger. This will be done by building and operating a security tokens exchange, and by on-boarding, a mix of institutional partners and small to medium enterprises, bringing the first assets to market.
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