Zano: An Overview
Privacy is a luxury few can enjoy. Gone are the days the average human being can enjoy a low-key lifestyle, thanks due in part to social media and the never-ending availability of a smart phone or camera. Even when it comes to our finances, not much is private. Bank accounts are constantly monitored with anti-money laundering and tax evasion software to help prevent white-collar crime.
Should your finances be protected from the watchful eye if your income is on the up and up? With everything else in life easily accessible, one of the hardest things to access, money, should retain that right. Cryptocurrency has done wonders to help address this privacy issue in the world of finance. One of those wonders is Zano (ZANO).
Launched on December 27th 2018, Zano is a cryptocurrency which provides security, privacy and scalability in e-commerce. It provides a PoW/PoS consensus hybrid which utilizes the strengths of both mechanisms to secure the blockchain while also utilizing CryptoNote, which makes transactions on this blockchain untraceable. In addition to transactions being untraceable, wallet balances are also hidden, rewarding all sending and receiving addresses with a maximum level of privacy not present on many blockchains.
The project is spearheaded by a skillfully diverse and reliable team. They consist of Andrey Sabelnikov (Co-Founder at Zano, lead developer of Cryptonote), Pavel Nikienkov (Co-Founder at Zano), Valeriy Pisarkov (Core Dev), Anton Sokolov (Principal Investigator), Alex Bobylev (Senior Analyst), Casey Milone (Messaging Specialist), Jed Thorne (Community Manager), Artem Turlenko (Lead Designer), and Artem Andreevsky (Quality Assurance). Boosting a wide variety of experience and expertise, they have proven themselves capable of driving forward a project as ambitious as Zano.
Zano provides excellent computational efficiency. It achieves this by utilizing three specific methodologies. They are:
- Component Based Modular Structure
- Forward and Backward Compatibility
- Asynchronous Core Architecture
Component Based Modular Structure is made up of the Daemon, miner, and wallet. The Daemon, which the whitepaper refers to as the main component of the modular structure, is the node. The miner completes miner tasks and forms new blocks on the blockchain. The wallet stores the users private keys and provides an interface for creating transactions.
Forward and Backward Compatibility is a strong part of Zano’s protocol. Zano allows older versions of client software to identify portions of data in the new messages that correspond to previous versions of messages. This type of compatibility resolves typical problems that may occur without this data being identified.
Asynchronous Core Architecture is a much more complicated part of the protocol. I’ve attached an image which includes figures and text from the whitepaper to better explain.
These improvements increase network strength and allows RPC requests to be handled in parallel instead of a one by one basis. As seen in the illustrations above, this improvement is quite overwhelming. Stable long-term connections provide more network stability and help the blockchain in various ways. An interesting upgrade over most other Cryptonote projects.
It is important to note that Zano is an evolution of another project known as Boolberry (BBR). It is similar in some aspects but boosts a completely different emission curve and premine in comparison to Zano. Users of BBR were given the opportunity to participate in a “coinSwap” to exchange their BBR for Zano, or they had the option to keep their stake BBR as it is still a supported project. 7.8 million Zano were swapped as a result, with the remaining 6 million coins burned. The result of the burn can be found here.
With the technical aspects out of the way, let’s focus on the coins statistics in terms of where it stands in the market and its blockchain. As of this writing according to CoinMarketCap.com, the current price of Zano is $0.389243 (-0.60%). It has a circulating supply of 10,289,315 coins with a total supply of 12,318,815. It holds a CMC ranking of 744, with an overall market capitalization of $4,005,044. The past 24 hours of volume consists of $10,128.
https://explorer.zano.org/ is the Zano blockchain explorer. The current statistics of the blockchain as of this writing are as follows:
When looking on this explorer, the privacy aspect is in full display, with no information on which wallet is receiving the mining reward from a block, along with who is sending coins when sending a transaction between wallets.
The Zano.org website provides download links to the mining software, wallet, and more. They also go into full detail as to why the block reward is only 1 coin. This explanation can be seen below.
Zano did have a Premine; the details of which can be found at this link. The team has also published a detail roadmap. It contains completed tasks along with future development and ongoing development checkpoints. Currently, the team is building a Decentralized Autonomous Marketplace, conducting privacy technology research (results will be published in a paper and information will be used for a future privacy update) along with implementing a privacy update (expected completion Q4 2020). It will be interesting to see how the e-commerce marketplace will play out and be utilized with the Zano blockchain.
It is apparent that Zano is an innovative and developing advocate of cryptocurrency and privacy. Their extensive research and dedication to building a new kind of privacy is clear evidence. With cryptocurrency becoming a mainstream conversation, governments and regulatory bodies are cracking down on the industry and invading its privacy just as they do in our everyday life. Privacy is an essential right which must be maintained and protected. If Zano has any say in the matter, the fate of our privacy in the form of a digital ledger is in good hands.
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Zano Links:
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5090272.0
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Zano/
- https://twitter.com/zano_project
- https://medium.com/@zano_project
- https://docs.zano.org/
