Binance’s futures platform is launching a Zcash (ZEC)–Tether (USDT) perpetual contract with maximum leverage of up to 50x. An announcement from the exchange on Feb. 4 revealed that trading for the new ZEC/USDT contract will go live at 8.00 a.m. on Feb. 5. In a bid to prevent market manipulation, Binance says it has chosen to set a pricing limit of ±1% on the mark price within the first 15 minutes after trading begins. Perpetual vs. traditional futures As reported, when the Binance Futures platform launched — offering maximum leverage of as high as 125x — the exchange emphasized it …

The Aztec privacy network has officially launched on the Ethereum blockchain on Feb. 1. Using Zcash-based technology, it introduces confidential tokens where all amounts are cryptographically hidden. The network is currently in limited deployment as it only supports zkDai, a private version of Maker’s stablecoin. Other zero knowledge tokens are set to be released in the coming weeks, while full access to custom token creation will be granted in two months, the company says. The Aztec protocol, just like Zcash (ZEC), uses Zk-SNARKs to validate encrypted transactions. When generating a transfer, a proof of correctness is generated as the amount …

Several major altcoins have outperformed Bitcoin in January 2020. However, with the reward halving just over three months away, Bitcoin might play catch up. During the previous two halvings, Bitcoin rallied just before and after the event. Weiss Ratings believes that history will repeat itself in the upcoming halving and the only question is how high can the rally extend. Bitcoin’s current technical set up has a variety of social media personalities feeling bullish about the digital asset’s future price action. In a recent market discussion with Cointelegraph, popular YouTubers The Moon (Carl Runefelt) and DataDash (Nicholas Merten) said that …

A recent poll revealed community support for Zcash mining reward changes, which will take effect in November 2020. With the Zcash Founder’s Reward terminating in November, the privacy asset’s mining situation has come into question, a blog post from one of the project's supporters, Electric Coin Company, or ECC, said on Jan. 28. Community votes in new specs Using a bevy of avenues, including Telegram and Twitter, the Zcash foundation questioned the coin’s community on mining payouts going forward, the blog post read. Taking effect in November during the coin’s halving, as per community polls, the new mining reward distribution …

Tron (TRX) is set to feature zero knowledge-based privacy through the work of the TRONZ team. A trusted setup ceremony is set to be conducted soon, which Tron claims in a Jan. 17 blog post will “set a new Guinness World Record.” TRONZ is a privacy initiative that is set to integrate Zk-SNARKs, the core privacy technology of Zcash (ZEC), in the Tron blockchain. While the team claims its implementation is the “most efficient, and least resource-consuming privacy protocol in the world,” no technical details were released. Built with the “advancement of blockchain technology” in mind, the TRONZ team has …

The for-profit developer behind Zcash (ZEC), Electric Coin Co. (ECC), has released on Jan. 15 a set of resources to facilitate the implementation of shielded transactions on mobile. This builds on early tests in 2019 conducted after the Sapling upgrade. The developer released a complete set of Software Development Kits (SDK) versions for both Android and iOS. While the former was an update of the 2019 version, now supporting the Zcash mainnet, the latter was created anew to provide equivalent functionality for Apple devices. In addition, the company released a compatible backend service specifically designed for mobile clients to efficiently …

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, said that he believes a “privacy coin” will go mainstream in the 20s. In a post published on Coinbase’s official blog on Jan. 3, Armstrong said that he believes in the 20s we will see the integration of privacy features into one of the major blockchains. He also foresees a cryptocurrency with such features to go mainstream in the following years: “Just like how the internet launched with HTTP, and only later introduced HTTPS as a default on many websites, I believe we’ll eventually see a “privacy coin” or …

Twitter user and software architect WizardofAus (@BTCSchellingPt) has warned cryptocurrency holders against a Chrome extension for Ledger crypto wallets that allegedly contains malware. In a tweet posted on Jan 2., WizardofAus claimed that: “Malware Chrome extension alert. If you have "Ledger Secure" installed - REMOVE IT. The @ChromeExtension "Ledger Secure" contains malware that passes your seed phrase back to the extension's author. This is *not* a @Ledger product. Successfully used against @hackedzec.” “@hackedzec”’s Twitter handle was notably created in Jan. 2020; both the handle’s novelty and the chosen name suggest that he created the account specifically to spread awareness following …

The right to privacy is a fundamental prerequisite for peace of mind and security. The idea that only criminals have something to hide is strange. Contrarily, privacy is sought by almost everyone. Yet, it still gets stigmatized as suspicious — reserved solely for criminals or deviants. Similarly sharing this unjust scrutiny are cryptocurrencies, which are — rather ironically — branded as a tool for felons, based largely on their anonymous hallmarks. However, no cryptocurrency is as disparaged for this discreet quality more than the privacy coin. But just what are privacy coins used for? How has crypto criminality changed in …

The Zcash Foundation, the firm behind privacy-centric cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC), has donated $40,000 to a Canadian private messaging developer. The Open Privacy Research Society, a non-profit group working on Cwtch, a decentralized metadata-resistant messenger, has received 1,044 ZEC from Zcash, the organization announced on Dec. 3. As described by Open Privacy, Cwtch is a platform for building decentralized infrastructure based on metadata-resistant communication applications. Derived from a Welsh word meaning “a hug that creates a safe space,” Cwtch is an extension of the metadata-resistant protocol Ricochet to support “asynchronous multi-peer group communications via discardable, untrusted, anonymous infrastructure.” Open Privacy integrates …

A Grin (GRIN) developer funded by the Litecoin Foundation has suggested a solution for fixing the “Achilles heel of Mimblewimble privacy.” David Burkett, a developer at Mimblewimble’s (MW) privacy-centric coin Grin, started a thread on monthly updates detailing progress on both Grin’s development and the integration of MW’s privacy-focused technology into Litecoin (LTC). The developer announced the news on Twitter on Dec. 1: “I'll be posting monthly status updates detailing progress on the LTC MW EB (YAY acronyms). This is geared toward those interested in LTC development, but will also talk a lot about Grin++ changes, so it may be …

At present, the combined capitalization of the 2,022 crypto assets with a known market cap was roughly $222 billion. On Nov. 19, 2017, just weeks before the current all-time highs would be set for the price and capitalization of Bitcoin and the crypto market overall, the 985 tokens with a known market cap represented a capitalization of around $244 billion — a similar zone to where the market is at currently. However, with the capitalization of Bitcoin (BTC) having grown 15% from $134.1 billion to $154.6 billion during the 24 months following November 2017, more than twice as many altcoins …