Zcoin (
http://zcoin.tech ) and ZCash are the only two cryptocurrencies that use zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee complete financial anonymity. ZCoin and ZCash seem to supplement each other quite nicely, and a good way to describe it would be sibling cryptocurrencies.
They are related in the sense that the academic community often see ZCoin as the stabler, more secure, and more proven cryptocurrency – whereas ZCash is seen as the more experimental coin using more dangerous and risky cryptography. For example, ZCoin uses the Zerocoin paper, which has been cited about 200 times by academic scholars, according to Google Search. And ZCash is cited about only half as many times. So ZCoin has about twice as much support from cryptography scholars as ZCash, because it’s based on much more stable and proven cryptography. On the other hand, ZCash has a lot fewer cryptography citations because it is based on something called ZK-Snarks, which only a few people in the world have researched.
Because ZCash is based on more risky cryptography, ZCash has this critical problem that ZCoin doesn’t face. ZCash attempts to conceal the amount of money sent in a transaction. By doing this, if ZCash has a major bug or double-spending problem, it would be unnoticed and someone could drain tens or hundreds of millions of dollars away from the ZCash market cap without anybody noticing a double spend.
Any project that involves new cryptography, including projects like ZCash, faces vulnerabilities. As we’ve seen with the Ethereum DAO project, about two hundred million dollars was drained away. Luckily, that money was recovered through a bailout because it was noticed and viewable on the public blockchain. But if ZCash faced a bug, it could potentially see hundreds of millions of dollars drained from its market cap and ZCash would be worth a lot less for speculators. In terms of practical differences, the only main differences are that zerocash is a version of the zerocoin protocol that conceals the amount in the transaction.
It uses different cryptographic schemes, but the end result is that the other information is all completely hidden through zero-knowledge proofs. Which guarantee 0 information about transaction recipient and sender.
However, that hiding of quantity sent in a transaction has the vulnerability of speculators potentially losing a lot of money through double-spends / other bugs that go unnoticed because of the hidden quantity. So I think ZCoin (
http://zcoin.tech ) could be a good supplement investment / hedge to ZCash.