Zen is Launching as a Harmonious Split with ZClassic in May

When ZClassic began, it quickly attracted a large community. There was clearly a desire for a privacy focused cryptocurrency with no corporate ties. As a fork of Zcash, ZClassic brought together a vision of a secure coin with no investors or businesses making the decisions on where to take development.

The Zclassic vision has resonated, and with more than 800 members in the ZClassic RocketChat/Slack, there is always active discussion on promotion, development, and continued support and differentiation from Zcash. Members of the community provide assistance for miners, help users of the wallets for different platforms, and coordinate marketing and social media efforts. The volunteer activity from the ZClassic community is noticeable in its effect on the cryptocurrency world.

Zcash is a Strong Foundation

The launch of Zcash as a fork of Bitcoin that adds zk-SNARKS and stealth addresses for completely secure transactions is revolutionary. By having the option of transparent or shielded transactions, Zcash enables cryptocurrency use by anyone for any purpose. It is a big improvement on Bitcoin, and the Zcash developers are talented and productive.

While recognizing and supporting the development direction of Zcash, one of the concerns raised by the members of the Zclasssic community is the potential for the Zcash development direction to be influenced by the Zcash investors. These investors funded the Zcash team and expect a return on that investment.

This return comes in the form of a redirection of a percentage of the mining reward to the Zcash Foundation, as well as a price appreciation of the coin as it becomes more used. Furthermore, the investors have the opportunity to influence the direction of Zcash development to increase the value of their other cryptocurrency investments, to the potential detriment of the use of Zcash as private cryptocurrency.

ZClassic is a community project

That corporate and investor influence is not present in ZClassic, which is strictly a community and volunteer effort project. There are many successful examples of open-source community projects that have come to dominate their respective fields, and ZClassic aims to be one of them. People who use ZClassic know that its continued development direction will be from the community, will continue to leverage the development efforts of the Zcash project, and will not be influenced by corporate or investor desires.

ZClassic has brought together a strong group of developers, who have created additional open-source projects in support of the coin. This includes Z-NOMP, an up-to date mining pool application for both ZClassic and Zcash, and the ZClassic Windows wallet. The developers of the Windows wallet also made it available for Zcash.

The ZClassic vision of a community supported version of Zcash with continued development and enhancement is clear and compelling. This is a cryptocurrency that will continue to see growth and further support.

Zen adds resiliency to security with governance

The idea for Zen grew out of discussions among the ZClassic community. Some of the team wanted to enable even more capability for the cryptocurrency. These additional features and capabilities led to the idea of a cryptocurrency that was something new and different, borrowing from other successful currencies like Dash and Decred, and then adding something more.

Realizing that many members of the ZClassic community are strong believers in the existing ZClassic vision, and many members want to support Zen, the new platform, the team realized they could do both. Zen could be launched as a fork of ZClassic, developers could work on both, then over time existing and new developers would gravitate toward one or the other.

Zen brings together many of the successful ideas proven in the existing cryptocurrencies:

1. Transparent and shielded transactions, like Zcash and ZClassic.
2. Secure messaging through shielded transactions.
3. A focus on encryption of network traffic, node resiliency, and application security.
4. Miners receive 88.14% of block reward. The rest is redirected for:
   1. 5% to the Zen DAO to fund growth of Zen through projects.
   2. 3.43% of the mining reward to publicly verified secure full nodes.
   3. 3.43% to the core team for Zen operations expenses.
5. Governance of the DAO through a voting process encompassing the Zen stakeholders, similar to Decred.

The features of Zen address some of the potential weaknesses of many of the older cryptocurrencies, and have the potential to make Zen the strongest and most capable coin available.

Redirection of a Portion of Miner Reward for Long Term Viability

By maintaining 88.14% of the mining reward with Zen miners, this ensures the network will gain significant mining hashpower, helping to process transactions, and protecting against a 51% attack.

Creating a Zen Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) helps to prioritize development projects, pay for marketing, integration, and complex development projects, and ensures fund available for aspects of the coin improvement that require payment. The governance of the DAO will bring in different elements of the Zen community, ensuring many different voices are heard, and helping to finance projects the community finds valuable.

Paying active nodes, and making sure they maintain a basic standard of security and performance will make Zen distributed, resilient, and secure. By enforcing encrypted communication between nodes, and between nodes and wallets, protects against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks.

As Zen grows in ability, the node operators who want to get paid will continue to keep their nodes up to date, will keep them secure, and will make sure they support the network as a whole. This payment adds a layer of resilience lacking in most other cryptocurrencies.

Zen also addresses a metadata weakness of other cryptocurrencies. By communicating in a potentially compromised fashion, then sending Bitcoin, transaction correlators have the ability to identify the participants of a Bitcoin transaction. Zen will incorporate secure messaging within shielded transactions, so users can first agree on the transaction, send it, then verify receipt. Fully anonymously and securely.

For more complex secure communication, Zen will integrate with distributed storage to the Inter-Planetary File System.

Zen Launches at Consensus in NYC on May 23

Zen will launch as a fork of ZClassic. Inspired by Ethereum Classic’s fork from Ethereum, all existing ZClassic holders will receive an equal amount of Zen at launch. This is a demonstration of the support of the community for both coins going forward. The Zen team is working with select Exchanges to assist in this process, and will announce the specific ways to make sure Zen coins are awarded 1-for-1 with existing ZClassic.

Zen will be launched May 23, 2017 at about 10 pm. We will have a party in NYC at Consensus. . By that time there will be many other elements of the launch in place. This includes:

• Verified exchange support
• Linux wallet and roadmap for other wallets
• Node specifications and configuration instructions
• Mining pool applications

This is an exciting time! Bitcoin has shown everyone what is possible with cryptocurrency, Zcash developed truly secure transactions, Dash demonstrated how developers and node operators should be rewarded with funding along with the miners, Decred showed a sustainable model for governance.

Zen is a truly revolutionary platform that takes the best from other crypto-currencies and adds secure communications, secure resilient nodes, and a governance organization to enable continued improvement forever!

If you would like to be part of the Zen movement, come find out more and become part of the community at zencash.io.