The ZCash (ZEC) project continues to struggle for prominence. The latest news concern a partnership with an applied cryptography company, StarkWare Industries.
https://twitter.com/zcashco/status/994432588109381633
The company was founded by former ZCash developers and scientists professor Eli Ben-Sasson and professor Alessandro Chiesa. Now, the early developers return as advisors and partners to the ZCash project, attempting to unroll the STARKs technology for anonymization.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems are already used on ZCash, in the form of ZK-SNARKs, and the StarkWare company plans to introduce an alternative workup.
Price Continues to Sink
ZEC has always been a niche coin, and somehow missed a more dramatic appreciation. The digital asset has received both accolades and criticisms, the latter coming from the Monero community.
Due to its low supply, ZEC has always commanded a relatively high price, but now the asset continues to slide below $300. In the past week, ZEC sank more than 16% to $259.43.
!ZEC!
It is unknown whether the Consensus 2018 event would bring a change of tides for the price. The event was recently boycotted by Vitalik Buterin for being connected to a potential exposure of users to an airdrop scam.
https://twitter.com/zcashco/status/994663660940283904
The biggest disadvantage for the ZEC asset is the inactive trading. Due to the high price, few investors jump in, as they would into cheaper coins. Also, the coin’s marketing is directed to large-scale investors, and ZEC has so far hovered locked within a range, not achieving rapid growth that would introduce panic-buying.
Recently, a team of British scientists tested the ZCash system, and discovered that users were compromising their privacy through address usage. Using a mix of transparent and shielded address makes ZEC transactions easier to trace, or at least reveal patterns of usage.
Additionally, the ZCash team faces research and a decision on the Antminer Z9 ASIC. Part of the community supports an ASIC-disabling fork, and threatens to leave the project in case large-scale ASIC mining is allowed to continue.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
