Privacy-focused altcoins
Privacy is a pressing issue in the world today. The digital age has made everyone’s personal data highly accessible through the internet. Aside from hackers, another great danger comes from private and public corporations using everyone’s data to create profiles for marketing purposes.
This is especially dangerous when it comes to people’s financial data. If your financial activity can be easily accessed, anyone can see your purchase history, brand and product preferences, and spending behaviors.
Given that crypto holds the future of finance, it makes sense to be more critical of which coins to trust. Fortunately, some cryptocurrencies have made great strides in promoting private, anonymous finance.
If you want to invest in financial privacy, here are some privacy-focused altcoins that are worth your time and money:
Monero (XMR)
Monero is a coin built from the ground up to promote privacy and security in finance. Unlike certain other cryptocurrencies, Monero isn’t based on the code of a more popular coin. Rather, Monero uses its own ring signature technology to hide the public keys of both the sender and the receiver during an exchange.
Monero does this by surrounding each transaction with several keys uninvolved in said transaction. Because of this, unscrupulous onlookers cannot determine the true keys used by the users. This also means that the coins themselves do not reveal information pointing to past purchases and exchanges. This makes the altcoin entirely anonymous yet highly fungible.
Having a market cap of over USD 3 billion, Monero is currently the highest valued privacy coin at the moment. While market value is not exactly an indicator of a cryptocurrency’s level of security, it does show that many users trust its privacy and anonymity features. As it is, there is minimal risk to making good use of your Monero wallet for this coin.
Dash (DASH)
Initially called Xcoin, Dash is considered to be the very first privacy-focused cryptocurrency. This altcoin is based on a fork of Bitcoin that gives users the option to send funds privately and works through an optional feature called PrivateSend. It basically hides the exchange history and details of any single coin by scrambling it with others on the blockchain.
This feature is primarily utilized by users who are bound by regional restrictions on the usage of cryptocurrency. By doing this, users under region locks can engage in transactions without their coins pointing back to them. Performing these PrivateSends does, however, incur an extra transaction fee.
Aside from this, Dash also boasts its InstantSend feature that processes transactions in seconds. It does this by making use of dedicated masternodes to validate transactions. In contrast, other coins rely on all nodes in a block, making transaction processing take much longer.
ZCash (ZEC)
The current second-largest privacy coin is ZCash with a market cap of a little under USD 2 billion. This altcoin was made as a middle ground between the functionality of the most popular cryptocurrencies and the privacy features demanded by users. Most of its programming is based on Bitcoin, particularly its open ledger system. The main difference it has from Bitcoin is that user information and transaction data are encrypted.
ZCash employs a technology called Zero-Knowledge Proofs that applies encryption even during transactions. This means that both sender and receiver can’t trace or identify the other party in their own exchange. Additionally, neither party can view the public key of the other. Likewise, any data recorded on the blockchain does not reveal the amount transferred in a transaction.
Crypton (CRP)
Crypton is a new privacy-centered altcoin that takes a more exclusivist approach to guarantee absolute privacy. It secures its community of users by making use of an ecosystem called Utopia. This ecosystem is made up of a series of applications and digital utilities by the developers of Crypton. With Utopia, all user interaction is siphoned through the same type of encryption.
In terms of cryptocurrencies, Crypton goes to extremes by assuring that neither transaction history nor metadata is recorded onto their blockchain. Absolutely no information can be found that can be traced back to a user or a transaction. The only issue at the moment is that most of a Crypton user’s digital activity can only be done through the Utopia ecosystem.
This ecosystem includes mining software, internet browsers, CRP wallets and exchanges, emails, and even chat messages. At the moment, the coin is still very young, and its market cap lies at around USD 3.5 million. If you’re willing to enter this ecosystem, you could become an early investor for a promising privacy coin.
Privacy is indeed scarce in this day and age. It makes sense when valuation alone is not enough for crypto investors to be confident about any privacy-focused altcoin’s level of security and anonymity. Still, we hope that this list has given you a better idea of your cryptocurrency options, and that you’ve found one that you can trust for the foreseeable future. That being said, don’t just take our word for it. It’s still best to do your own research to make the most responsible decision with your money.
