Of course we are working on Poloniex being added but we won't make any promises although we remain hopeful. What would help is filling in their coin request form as well
https://poloniex.com/coinRequestA strong community support would go a long way towards getting Zcoin added to Polo though we're working on building awareness of what Zcoin is and stands for as there's a lot of misunderstanding of what Zcoin is. There are still people that think Zcoin is a Zcash fork which has been addressed many times (including in the OP).
We are the first working cryptocurrency using zero knowledge proofs that have
WORKING private transactions that is ready to be used today unlike Zcash that was supposedly being worked on for years and had extensive testing and yet still manages to not have its most important feature working. Even when Zcash does get its private transactions working, Zcoin retains many advantages over Zcash
- Parameter generation does not require trust of developers.
- Private transactions with less computational requirements
- A much more well understood cryptographic implementation
- Much more easily integrated to existing Bitcoin merchants
And we have a working QT GUI.
So if you base it off the fundamentals of the coin and look past the hype, Zcoin has achieved a lot and will continue to break new ground when MTP is implemented despite the smaller team and budget.
We are committed to working on the project for the long term and active development continues every single day. If anyone is interested in joining us and helping out with the dev and marketing (with proper experience), bounties are available which would accelerate growth a lot more in the long term. There's a lot of work to be done and we welcome help to make a vision of a truly anonymous coin a reality.
The first step is being done with the new much nicer website launch and the content is being updated. Instructional videos will follow soon along with a list of merchants who have agreed to accept Zcoin.
To us, it's not so much the development of the coin now (which still continues as fast as is possible with our devs) but more on the marketing and building awareness and making it accessible to the public.