ABOUT ZCASH
Launched in 2016 by Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn and based on the Zerocoin protocol, Zcash (ZEC) is a decentralized and open-source privacy-focused cryptocurrency that enables selective transparency of transactions. Zcash transactions can either be transparent or shielded through a zero-knowledge proof called zk-SNARKs. This allows the network to maintain a secure ledger of balances without disclosing the parties or amounts involved. Instead of publishing spend-authority and transaction values, the transaction metadata is encrypted and zk-SNARKs are used to prove that nobody is being dishonest.
WHY IS ZCASH BEING ABANDONED BY USERS?
According to data from Coin metrics, it began to stop using Zcash, whose price was negative last year.
Seeing a peak in the number of active addresses with over 100,000 active addresses in January 2018, Zcash's number of active addresses began to gradually decline. The decline began slowly, and Zcash maintained 90,000 active addresses until June 2018.
Things changed drastically in July 2018, when the number of active addresses halved, before continuing to decline rapidly to date, through the rest of 2018. The number of active Zcash addresses now stands at 11,218, the lowest level since October 2016.
https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc_right=AdrActCnt_zoom=1299724426309.7383,1596249226309.7383
Zcash uses a complex cryptography (encryption) to allow purely private cryptocurrency transactions. However, unlike Monero, private operations are not active by default. As a result, the use of privacy features has remained historically low. To make matters worse, many cryptocurrency exchanges began delist (a convenience store removal process) privacy coins due to legal concerns, and as a result such cryptocurrencies lost great momentum.
Zcash has also lost close to 97 per cent in value over the past two years, falling to its current value of $ 27.84 after its peak of over $ 900 in January 2018. Its price has fallen by almost half in the past year alone.
People trade less Zcash now. Zcash saw last year's trading transaction volume continue to fall, falling to $ 150 million after a peak of over $ 300 million a day in the second quarter of 2019.
Although Zcash has seen the number of active wallet addresses decline in recent months, the trend across the market is different. Many other cryptocurrencies have experienced a significant upswing in network activity recently. Among them, Decred (DCR) stands out and the cryptocurrency is heading for an all-time high, seeing a dramatic increase in the number of active addresses in the second half of 2019, with trading volume also extremely elevated. Despite this, the price of DCR fell 30 percent over the same time period.
