I have some ideas about how to integrate (parts of) the Zerocash system
http://zerocash-project.org/paper into Anoncoin. If the ANC devs are interested in experimenting with a few things on testnet please let me know.
Unfortunately for ANC if substantial progress is not made soon I am afraid DRK (or potentially a few others) will win the battle for anonymous coin supremacy (by winning the adoption race) even if its technology is not necessarily the best.
I don't think that the competition is Dark Coin: they will slowly go away as better solutions are offered. Nevertheless, if Matthew Green and his team releases Zerocash before Anoncoin releases their version of Zerocoin, Anoncoin will be dead with no hope of resurrection, EVER. Matthew Green brings "respectability" to the table (at least to some, I could care less) as an academic crytptographer, and they are certain to find a setup of their initial parameters that will likely be "acceptable", even if it is not trustless. It is true that you can not monitor the total money supply of Zerocash, and that trust is an important issue, but if people trust Darkcoin and CryptoNote, they will certainly trust Zerocash. Furthermore, as a coin coming from academia, I am certain that Zerocash will be introduced in a fair manner (unlike DRK), and will come with ample documentation.
According to Ian Meirs's twitter feed, they are planning a Zerocash release in 3-6 months time (
https://twitter.com/secparam/status/468784402558771200). The Anoncoin devs are way behind schedule, have not set up the testnet, and are not responding at all to help that is being offered from the community. I have tried to contact them via this forum, reddit, and the irc channel, offering 20 cores for the entire month of June for their brute force attacks on RSA UFOs, and have received no response. A previous poster offered 5000 USD in matching funds for Gnosis if he finished Zerocoin by June 1, and he wasn't even interested (10k in ANC would certainly become 1 million a month later, if successful....). Though Meeh stated in March that Gnosis received financial backing to implement Zerocoin, Meeh's last post states that Gnosis is busy with his other full time job and can not commit ample time to Zerocoin. Meeh's idea of "I'll get back with more Anoncoin updates soon!" is 3 months time. In three more months, zerocash could already be here.
So, my prognosis is the following: If the developers have nothing to show us by July 1, this coin will die.