Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Three Month Update

By Contrast Crypto on Altcoin Academy

Contrast Crypto
The Dark Side
Published in
8 min readDec 2, 2019

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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.

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Biggest Gain

This month, Loki saw a roughly +22% increase from $277.90 to $339.18

Biggest Loss

This month, both Dusk and Zcash saw a drop of roughly -26% each, with Dusk dropping from $42.89 to $32.07, and Zcash dropping from $83.50 to $61.82

Current Standings:

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

  1. $LOKI: Loki — Started at $100, last month was at $277.90 — is now at $339.18 (+22%)
  2. $GRIN: Grin — Started at $100, last month was at $53.21 — is now at $64.19 (+20%)
  3. $ZEN: Horizen — Started at $100, last month was at $104.46 — is now at $117.98 (+13%)
  4. $XVG: Verge — Started at $100, last month was at $83.30 — is now at $83.95 (+1%)
  5. $BEAM: Beam — Started at $100, last month was at $52.28 — is now at $46.16 (-12%)
  6. $XMR: Monero — Started at $100, last month was at $86.04 — is now at $75.38 (-12%)
  7. $BCN: Bytecoin — Started at $100, last month was at $68.22 — is now at $54.95 (-20%)
  8. $DASH: Dash — Started at $100, last month was at $90.68 — is now at $67.64 (-25%)
  9. $XZC: Zcoin — Started at $100, last month was at $86.84 — is now at $65.68 (-25%)
  10. $ZEC: Zcash — Started at $100, last month was at $83.50 — is now at $61.82 (-26%)
  11. $DUSK: Dusk — Started at $100, last month was at $42.89— is now at $32.07 (-26%)

Interesting Notes:

The wildcard entries are still performing as wildcards should (wildly). Loki is leading the pack and Dusk is bringing things up the rear. Loki is up over 200%, while Dusk is down over 70%.

4/11 of the coins this month finished in the green compared to last month, while 7/11 coins performed worse in November than in October.

Only 2/11 coins have increased in value since the beginning of the Battle of the Privacy Coins started, they are Loki and Horizen — the two coins with a private messaging aspect to their project.

News & Updates

In order of overall standings…

Loki Network

This month the Loki project team have started to publish blockchain basics articles, covering what cryptocurrency is, ROI calculations, and the ins and outs of masternodes.

All exchanges $LOKI is listed on have upgraded to Loki’s Trusty Tyr checkpointing feature, which should mean shorter wait times for getting your $LOKI onto an exchange.

Loki Messenger has published the multi-device support update, meaning you can now sync Loki Messenger messages across a primary and secondary device — usually a phone and computer. Loki Messenger also saw the addition of file attachments added to the feature list.

The team are working on the final touches of Blink, which will enable near-instant (1–5 second) transactions.

Loki’s Service Node count briefly reached 1,000 nodes.

Horizen

Horizen posted their quarterly report, which covered updates and milestones for Horizen Sidechains Alpha, the new $ZEN faucet, and updates to the Sphere application.

Horizen’s Core Developer repository has been moved to a public repository, demonstrating the team’s commitment to openness and transparency. You can also follow Horizen on Instagram now, for more behind the scenes action.

This month was a good month for $ZEN listings, as it was listed on BCBitcoin.com, BW.com, TOKOK, and Fox.one.

A community survey was completed — mostly by $ZEN node operators — which will allow the Horizen team to reshuffle their efforts a little bit to making improvements to marketing campaigns, increase community engagement, improve wallets, list on more exchanges, and produce better node setup instructions and documentation.

Verge

The Verge team have announced an upcoming hard fork which is scheduled to take place in mid-December.

Verge founder, Justin Sunerok, was interviewed by Gokhstein Magazine. You can read the interview here.

It was a good month for listings for the $XVG team, listed on both the Scavo Exchange and the ABRA application.

If you missed the AMA with AtomicWallet.io, you can catch up on that here.

Monero

The Monero team have announced that they are going to phase out PaymentIDs as a way to simplify the transaction process and improve user experience.

Monero Outreach have issued a response to the Coinbase blog covering Proof of Work security. The team acknowledges the article gives a good overview of PoW technology; however, its presentation of Monero is outdated and some of its arguments and opinions are flawed.

Monero recently upgraded to the RandomX mining algorithm which should give Monero miners a slight boost in performance.

Are you looking to contribute to Monero? Read about how you can get started helping out here.

Unfortunately this month Monero was delisted from BitBay.

Dash

Dash have recently gone live with their updated roadmap for the coming months and dash.org has been launched in Chinese.

You can now use Chatex to send peer-to-peer $DASH transactions. Chatex is a social media bot that acts as an escrow service until the trade is complete. ash Thailand, which forged the integration, said that InstantSend will also be supported soon.

72 new merchants can now accept $DASH via the BitRefill service which allows you to buy digital gift cards using cryptocurrency.

Dash have announced they will host an event to showcase the upcoming launch of Evolution, their new platform set for release in the upcoming months.

Zcoin

The Zcoin team have released a write up detailing the path Zcoin must take to reach a state of organizational decentralization. You can read more about it here.

It was a good month for Zcoin listings, they were listed on BitLadon, zg.com, and ABRA. Zcoin have also partnered with HummingBot to enable community market making.

A new beta release of the Zcoin wallet interface has been released.

Check out the Zcoin’s BlockShow 2019 interview on BlockTV. You can watch it here.

Grin

Submissions are now closed for the Grin 2020 roadmap planning. An announcement covering how that will look should be released in the coming months.

Litecoin’s Charlie Lee was interviewed on GrinTalk this month. He spoke about how the LTC Foundation will continue to support the ongoing development of Grin++.

Grin received another Coinbase donation to the Grin General Fund. The person has wished to remain anonymous, but it shows that someone from the early Bitcoin days is a fan of what the Grin project team is doing.

November saw claims surfacing of MimbleWimble being broken. The Grin team, however, claims that the described attack on MimbleWimble is a misunderstanding of a known limitation. You can read more about it here. The Grin team were interviewed by The Block, covering the broken MimbleWimble claims.

$GRIN was added to the Hydax Exchange, who will donate the first 12 months' worth of $GRIN fees to the Grin Development Fund.

Zcash

You can now securely store your $ZEC on the SafePal wallet, the first cryptocurrency hardware wallet backed by Binance Labs.

The Electric Coin Company have donated the Zcash trademark to the Zcash Foundation, an independent non-profit that focuses on financial privacy, Zcash development, and community engagement.

ZecWalletLite has been released in Public Beta.

A new roadmap — aka the Electric Coin Company 2020 Flight Plan — has been announced. You can read more about that here.

If you missed the November 12 livestream, don’t stress, you can read the Livestream Roundup here.

Bytecoin

Yet another slow month for Bytecoin in terms of community engagement and project development.

The Bytecoin Twitter (including the Bytecoin Foundation and Bytecoin Developer account) is barren, void of even the most minuscule of interactions. The Bytecoin Subreddit, however, shows some signs of life, although mostly coming from the community.

Community members are worried at the lack of development, communication and trading volume for Bytecoin — but they will hold.

Bytecoin have not yet released the new updated roadmap that was announced last month. Maybe next month.

Beam

Beam published a report this month covering the recent MimbleWimble attacks seen this month. You can read the report here. In summary, the MimbleWimble attack that affected Grin does not affect Beam.

In completely unrelated news, Upblock published a privacy report on the Beam technology this month. If you’re interested, you can read the report here.

Announcing the Beam Foundation! After 18 months functioning as a for-profit company, Beam is now making the transition to a not-for-profit state.

This month beam was listed on both Pionex and MXC. In other exchange news, Atomic Swaps will be coming to $BEAM soon!

Dusk

The Dusk team recently had a round table discussion with Chief Product Officer of Polymath. This was a great opportunity for the team to discuss their move away from Ethereum to a purpose-built protocol powered by Zero-Knowledge proofs.

Dusk has joined the Partners for International Business program to establish lasting international relations, with the support of RVO, a Dutch government organization.

Dusk’s most recently developer update has been published and available to read here.

I hope you found this content helpful. If you have any suggestions for future content, please comment below. Alternatively, you can find us on Twitter at @ContrastCrypto.

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Contrast Crypto
The Dark Side

Sharing news and contrasting similar blockchain/cryptocurrency projects. Digital privacy is as important as physical privacy.