This privacy coin is falling out of favor with crypto lovers

By Daniel Phillips

Far fewer people have been using privacy coin Zcash over the last year, according to data analysts Coin Metrics, while its price has equally suffered.

After reaching a peak of more than 100,000 active addresses in January 2018, Zcash has seen this number gradually fall. This erosion began slowly, with Zcash still retaining more than 90,000 active addresses by June 2018.

However, things changed drastically from July 2018, when the number of active addresses halved, before continuing to rapidly decrease throughout the remainder of 2018, up until today. The number of active Zcash addresses now sits at around 11,218, its lowest value since October 2016.

Zcash uses complex cryptography to allow for completely private cryptocurrency transactions. However, unlike Monero, private transactions are not on by default. As a result, usage of its privacy features historically remained low. Worse, many crypto exchanges are starting to delist privacy coins—including Coinbase knocking Zcash off the list in the UK, in August—due to regulatory concerns. As a result, the coin has lost its momentum.

Zcash has also seen a concomitant decrease in value in the past two years, having fallen from a peak of over $900 in January 2018, down to its current value of just $27.84—equivalent to a loss of almost 97% in just 23 months. Its price has nearly halved in the last year alone.

Likewise, far fewer people are trading it too. Zcash has seen its daily trade volume remain diminish over the past year, falling from a peak of more than $300 million per day throughout Q2 2019, down to around $150 million throughout much of Q3 and Q4.

Although Zcash has seen the number of active wallet addresses decline in recent months, this trend isn't seen across the entire market. In fact, many other cryptocurrencies have experienced a significant uptick in activity recently.

Among these, Decred (DCR) stands out as an outlier, with the cryptocurrency seeing a dramatic spike in active addresses in the second half of 2019, and is now approaching a new all-time high. Trading volumes are also high too. Despite this, over the same time period, its price has dropped by 30%.

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