Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that hide the details of a transaction. Asides from this, they are fungible. Monero and Zcash are the two most popular privacy coins right now. However, which would be a better investment?
Monero was launched in April 2014 to support censorship-resistant and private transactions. It operates on an opaque blockchain that uses privacy-enhancing tools to maintain the confidentiality of transactions and make them untraceable. This includes stealth addresses, ring signatures, and ring CT. It uses the CryptoNote protocol to group transactions together and the proof-of-work consensus algorithm to validate them.
Zcash was launched in October 2016 by Zooko Wilcox as a fork of Bitcoin. It allows selective transparency and privacy of transactions. It comprises two addresses- Z-Addresses (private) and T-Addresses (transparent). It uses zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) in achieving its high-level privacy.
Although they are both privacy coins, they have different cryptography, the underlying protocol, and mining model. While Monero is entirely anonymous, Zcash allows users to perform a shielded or transparent transaction. However, they are both ACIS resistant and risk being regulated in the future. Monero has a block time of two minutes, while Zcash has a block tune of nearly three minutes.
Unlike Zcash, which is somewhat harder to use, Monero is gaining massive adoption on the dark web. Also, it has found use in in-browsing mining, allowing its mining software to be run from an internet browser. However, Zcash has a very low transaction fee (averaging 0.0001 ZEC) compared to Monero. Although both have scalability issues, Monero is more scalable than Zcash due to its block size limit.
XMR is worth $153.20 right now with a market cap of $2.76 billion, while ZEC has a market cap of $1.16 billion at $95.99. Of the two, XMR would make a better investment as it is 100% private, scalable, and untraceable. However, dealing with these coins can be very risky as they are under the radar of regulations. Deal wisely and do the necessary research.