The thing is there are so many coins with privacy capabilities these days, You have Monero, all the Zsnark coins, Deep onion, Byteball (blackbytes), Dash etc etc. Zcash has an uphill battle, It's a fork of a fork of a fork and is starting to fade into obscurity. It's swimming in a pool of giants, and doesn't even have a presence on Bitcointalk anymore after the ANN was locked. They didn't have an ICO so there are no funds for marketing. With the marketcap currently so low, i have a hard time seeing how they're going to gain the exposure to dig themselves out of the trenches.
The best bet at this point is for them to hope that Zcash explodes and they can ride the wave like how ETC did with ETH. But even in that scenario they might get overlooked for zClassic.
I believe what makes Zencash stand out is their secure nodes and some features other privacy coins don’t have. They want to be the ultimate in privacy when it comes to transactions and publishing.
As for funds; they seem to have that figured out and currently have funds. This is from their website:
“The ZenCash Treasury fund is generated by 8.5% of each block mining reward and is used for operations, development, and getting out the message of Zen to the World.”In fact the founder said in the chat session that even at today’s prices they have money to pay for development and marketing.
Think about this: First, they got hammered at the start, then they go through the so-called Altcoin correction and now this Bitcoin Fork that’s causing most altcoins to go down. Then you add the fact that this company is only a few months old so it’s hasn’t had much news yet. This company has been running off of fumes, yet they still have enough to pay for developers and marketing. This tells me there was some thought put into this when they set this up. Is it perfect? No, but they are always open to suggestions to make improvements.
I’m not sure I mentioned this before, but unlike other projects out there that might be a scam or simply too complicated to ever come to fruition. This project is very doable. They are only a week or two away from testing the secure node program, so they are already close to that aspect of the project.
Also: don’t underestimate the value of Charles Hoskinson, and Steven Nerayoff's backing of this project.
Of course I could be wrong about its future in the cryptocurrency world, I’m trying to make an educated guess like everyone else, but right now I still like its potential.