ZCash (ZEC), one of the anonymous currencies enjoying the verbal support of Vitalik Buterin, outlined its future during the Zcon0 event.
ZCash has been around for a relatively short time, about a year, but has been run by the ZCash Company and the Foundation, and the level of centralization has allowed for fast changes and a planned future. Recently, the ZCash protocol performed the Overwinter hard fork, a mandatory update, to be followed by new hard forks in the coming years.
https://twitter.com/str4d/status/1011440694429454336
However, ZCAsh will not immediately change its mining protocol, to disable the recently released ASIC. For now, the ZCash hashrate has not shown too much fluctuation, or a rapid growth that may be indicative of ASIC working in the background, or being shipped and operational. There is only a slight uptick in mining.
However, this configuration may change soon, as the new miners are being shipped:
https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1012328907490713600
The decision not to disable the ASIC was achieved in a recently completed vote at the ZCash Foundation. The decision was, in effect, showing that ZCash is relatively centralized, with a governing board set in place to vote for future decisions. One of the curious things is that the newly suggested mining algorithm would be immediately disclosed to potential producers of mining equipment, making the ZCash network reliant on the specialized hardware. For now, Bitmain is still the leader in ASIC production, though ZCash has set hopes it could attract other hardware companies. A two-year deadline with a known algorithm may be enough to produce the new ASIC machines.
It is possible that ZCash chooses a multiple mining algorithm by the year 2020, to spread some of the rewards and not lose the GPU miners, who may make up a substantial part of the ZCash supportive community.
https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1012435627059634178
The ZEC market price has moved on a totally different logic, not taking into account the conference and increased popularity. Despite the active marketing, ZEC is still a niche asset, and remains volatile.
!ZEC!
ZEC relies for its volumes on LBank and HitBTC, exchanges with a lower popularity. Around half the volumes are in Bitcoin pairs, hence the price weakness as BTC slid toward $5,800. ZEC lost another 7% overnight to $149.66, down more than 18% this week.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
