World’s first ZEC/AUD pair goes live as CoinJar adds Zcash
Invisible money is great news for anyone who's just not feeling all the AUD note redesigns.
Tired of boring old AUD and looking for a change? Just not feeling the new $50 note? Thinking of spicing up your financial life by swapping out government money for wild techno-dollars? You're in luck.
You can now trade that boring old AUD for stylish new ZEC at CoinJar to start enjoying currency with infinitely more Zs in its name than the dollar.
It's notable not only as the world's first AUD/ZEC pairing, but also in the context of Zcash joining a very choosy exchange, being easily spendable with CoinJar's Swipe debit card and addressing Zcash's selective disclosure modes.
"We are incredibly selective over which assets we add and feel that Zcash is a meaningful addition to our existing portfolio of four digital assets. At this time, we will only support Zcash transparent addresses, but we aim to adopt and support shielded addresses at the first opportunity," said CoinJar's Mr Tan.
The transparent addresses part refers to Zcash's selective disclosure modes. This is essentially an option to switch anonymity on and off as needed, hiding certain information from the blockchain, including concealing one's wallet addresses and the details of a transaction. But initially CoinJar will only be taking transparent addresses, almost certainly due to the need to comply with its AML/KYC obligations.
This is par for the course. Coinbase, when it announced that it was exploring a Zcash listing, also said it would only support transparent addresses.
It's also worth noting that Zcash has a fairly prestigious pedigree. The Zerocoin protocol is one of the more popular foundations of privacy in cryptocurrency, and Zcash has some of the initial developers and researchers of the protocol itself on the team. Privacy in cryptocurrency is an extremely technical, complex and challenging area, so whenever a coin claims privacy, it's well worth considering the technical chops of the team behind it.
Beyond the selective disclosures mode, Zcash, and any other coin using the Zerocoin protocol, achieves privacy with a system that essentially functions as a built-in tumbler. This tumbler basically mixes up coins in a way that they can't be told apart, with the function of essentially wiping out their history and cleaning them.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VET, XLM, BTC and ADA.
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