For a while now, people in the privacy cryptocurrency space have frowned upon non-mandatory privacy. Their claim is that not enough people will use the privacy transaction features or keep their balance private when not spending. The 10+ million zPIV supply of PIVX proves otherwise.
The PIVX developers are constantly working on making sure goals are met, delivering features that have never been accomplished before. The ability to keep your balance completely private by simply converting PIV into zPIV is one of those features. Another crypto first developed was “zPoS” (Zerocoin Proof of Stake) which is a fully private staking mechanism allowing people to stake their zPIV and privately earn 3 zPIV as a reward when they win a block, instead of a public 2 PIV block reward when staking PIV using PoS. The zPoS protocol is the first to incentivize privacy.
The effects of zPoS are now showing and the outcome is even better than expected. PIVX is now nearing a whopping 20% in zPIV supply whereas Zcash typically only has around 6% of their coins shielded.
The Zerocoin protocol works where a higher the supply of zPIV (divided in accumulators of 1 zPIV, 5 zPIV, 10 zPIV, etc.), the better the privacy. If you would spend 1 zPIV, the anonymity set that the protocol uses to secure and ensure privacy is currently above 66,000! Just looking at the 1 zPIV denomination set, PIVX has a larger set size in total than all the accumulators combined in Zcoin. This is largely achieved by the innovation of zPoS and the consistent improvement of the original Zerocoin protocol.
The total number of zPIV is only expected to grow, as many improvements to zPIV and zPoS are in the pipeline. The most requested improvement, by many users, is precomputed proofs, which will greatly improve zPIV spend times and improve zPoS efficiency. Soon to follow will be Bulletproofs to significantly decrease its proof sizes and create a trustless setup.
Thanks to the mobile/light wallet core developer known as Furszy, spending and minting zPIV through mobile will also become a reality very soon. This will further increase the usability and therefore usage for the public and real-use cases.
The constant innovations by its development team and the community has turned PIVX into one of the most unique cryptocurrencies in the market today and will continue into the future.
