Hi investors, today we're having a look at ZenCash.

ZenCash.

We will start with a look over the fundamentals of ZenCash and compare the project to ZCash where necessary (I). Then, we'll take a peek at the market in order to help new investors time their entry as efficiently as possible (II).

Executive Summary.

ZenCash is a privacy-focused platform of services based on a blockchain data structure and zk-snarks cryptography. The project launched in May 2017 as a fork of ZClassic which itself was a forked copy of ZCash minus the 20% founder's reward. ZCash and ZenCash share similar fundamentals such as their total supply of coins (21 million), consensus algorithm (POW) and cryptography (zk-snarks) but differ considerably with regards to the scope of their project.

Unlike ZCash which aims at challenging Bitcoin in the store of value category, the goal of ZenCash is to offer an entire suite of private, consumer friendly applications secured by the largest network of economically incentivized nodes in the crypto industry. Such applications currently involve ZenCash (money), ZenPub (Media) and ZenChat (Messaging) and many more are in development and will roll out in the coming months or years.

Both ZCash and ZenCash have attracted the attention of powerful investors in the crypto-world. ZCash has a technology partnership with JP Morgan Chase and its own investment trust sponsored by Barry Silbert's Grayscale Investment LLC while ZenCash was recently added to Digital Currency Group's investment portfolio and has a technology partnership with IOHK, the blockchain R&D company behind the Cardano project.

In terms of distribution, ZCash is still way ahead of ZenCash. ZCash is currently listed across multiple exchanges and boast a hundred trading pairs while ZenCash is only listed on 7 exchanges across 14 trading pairs. Interestingly ZCash recent listing on licensed New York exchange Gemini could very well pave the way to the currency being added to Coinbase in the future. Since neither ZCash nor ZenCash were spawned from an ICO and both share much of the same fundamentals, it's not unreasonable to imagine ZenCash following suit once its distribution becomes more widely spread.

In the face of growing tensions between compliance to data protection laws on the enterprise side and increasing demand for privacy on the consumer side, both projects bet that zk-snarks-enabled selective privacy will be an indispensable feature for the blockchain solutions of tomorrow.

Technical Market Analysis.

ZenCash is trading at $28.5 at the time of writing. The coin reached an all time high of $65.5 USD on January 11th 2018 and was trading as low as $3.2 USD during the month of August 2017. Today, most of ZenCash trading volume originates from 3 markets: BITTREX, OKEx and UpBit with the ZEN/BTC pair on BITTREX representing 62% of the auction. This is where our analysis will take place.

Most of the auction in this market is very range bound and prone to considerable volatility and slippage due to it being so thinly traded. Thin order books are not only a consequence of the very limited distribution of the coin but also because a large chunk of the circulating supply is locked away into secure or super nodes.

Since the coin is currently trading mid-range, any new investor should adopt the strategy of scaling into a position with incrementally more aggressive buys as the coin either loses dollar value (cost averaging down) or confirms an uptrend. In the latter case, if the price start squeezing into resistance to eventually break out, the new investor should wait for a retest of resistance turned support to fully enter into her position (blue circle on the chart below).

As far as long term valuation is concerned, it can be quite tricky to give any realistic price prediction for ZenCash as this will entirely depend on the success of the project as well as the meta-trend (Bitcoin) but a ZenCash break out relative to Bitcoin would probably take us back to a retest of all time-high although given the current market conditions it's unlikely that we will produce such a move any time soon.

To summarize, ZenCash is a solid privacy project with all the attributes of a long-term buy and the additional benefit of generating passive income. On the flip side the project has under-performed relative to its potential and is very much a high-risk, high-reward play which success will depend not only on its team's ability to implement their project and continue growing the community but also on differentiating itself from ZCash and secure a better distribution for the coin.

---

If you liked this post please consider supporting Dan's blog by upvoting, re-steeming and following yours truly and If you'd like more content like this or if you're simply interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies, come join my awesome community on Discord. Don't be shy, it's free!!