Unchain your Wealth: Spotlight on Zano

None of this is should be construed as financial advice, obviously… but enjoy the content nonetheless!

This is the first in a series where I highlight a single cryptocurrency with the properties of money. Think of it as a companion to fundamental analysis so you can easily make your own decisions about it but without all the technical jargon that makes you fall asleep the moment you read it.

I’ll be updating this page as the ecosystem grows to ensure you have the latest on Zano’s exciting growth.

The Road to Financial Freedom

Wealth isn’t just about becoming wealthy. It’s about your right to pursue liberty. Wealth offers you the ability to increase the number choices you have to live the life you want.

The best way to do this is with money that helps preserve that right. Gold absolutely provides that freedom because you don’t need to use it within any institution. In fact, with Goldbacks, you can use it like cash anonymously and privately at many brick and mortar stores. With cryptocurrencies, now you can do the same with coins like Monero, Zano, and Pirate Chain with participating merchants and users.

Untraceable. Unstoppable.

Zano (Ticker: $ZANO) is a decentralized, private-by-default cryptocurrency.

Being private-by-default means nearly all information about transactions are private between sender and receiver, including the amounts- just like physical cash or gold transactions. This means it protects your right to financial privacy and anonymity. Zano has all seven monetary properties of money, including the three additional properties of money for digital assets, and is relatively scarce so I’m inclined to say, like Monero, it’s a form of money.

Zano appears to be fairly durable in that it’s approach to secure the network is a hybrid approach of Proof-of Work (mining) and Proof-of-Stake (staking). The two together make the network extremely difficult to attack.

It’s privacy-by-default makes the primary asset ($ZANO) and all Zano tokens fungible and it’s divisibility make it a good unit of account.

I’m impressed at how easy Zano is to use. The developers really paid attention to the UI and have responded to user feedback positively and I have watched it get easier to use over time. This bodes extremely well for Zano because an easy-to-use user interface (UI) makes it easy to be a medium of exchange. It already works on mobile, in your browser, and on your desktop.

Zano has all the properties of money.

Durable	✅
Portable	✅
Divisible	✅
Fungible	✅
Unit of Account	✅
Medium of Exchange	✅
Store of Value	✅
Decentralized	✅
Private	✅
Scalable	✅***

***One caveat with scaling. Zano doesn’t have any truly dedicated mechanisms by which to scale to the globe if/when adoption really ramps up. It does have dynamic block size, meaning blocks in the blockchain can grow and shrink based on demand, which aids during times of congestion but it’s not a silver bullet. For the moment, Zano can meet network demand so this discussion is a bit of a ways off. One ray of hope for the future is that Zano devs are researching sharding, a method of scaling which I talk about in more detail below.

Taken together, Zano is a powerful money that can help you secure your rights!

Tokenomics

Tokenomics refers to economics of the coin itself. The Zano token ($ZANO) has a theoretically infinite supply, like gold and Monero, but has an emission rate (just a fancy way of saying “inflation rate”) low enough that it’s supply can become deflationary as use grows.

From the official Zano docs:

Zano decided to set the block reward relatively low to avoid unnecessary selling price pressure while keeping the chain safe from flood attacks. We have an uncapped max supply because the assumption that only the TX fees would be enough to cover miners’ appetite might not be accurate and Bitcoin might become a sad example of this. A fixed emission ensures that stakers and miners will always secure the network.

On Zano, all network fees are being burned, meaning that with enough network usage, the daily fee burning could surpass the emission from block rewards, resulting in supply becoming deflationary over time.

As Zano grows in use, the supply is burned through its transaction fees making Zano deflationary like gold but with a small infinite inflation, miners and stakers are incentivized to keep the network secure.

This screenshot from the Zano docs gives you some inflation/emission data at a glance.

Merchant Adoption

I happen to know there are a dedicated group of people working to reach out and grow Zano for merchants. Even though there aren’t many payment processors who accept it at the moment, it doesn’t mean you cannot accept Zano for business with a mobile wallet.

Currently, there aren’t many tools out there for merchants so it can make getting established businesses to accept Zano a bit more difficult, but not impossible. That’s not to say no tools exist it’s just that adoption can take some time. I do know there are merchant tools being built right now so it’s only a matter of time until merchants can take full advantage of Zano.

That said, there’s a really great resource for finding where you can spend Zano called ZanoList. From Zanolist’s website: “From online stores and merchants to service providers and marketplaces, Zanolist connects you to many businesses that accept Zano, ensuring your transactions remain private, secure, and efficient.” Additionally, Zanolist has a bounty for those who can help get a payment processor to accept Zano. Zanolist will keep expanding the number of resources over time.

If you’re a business owner and you’re looking to accept Zano, reach out the community and let them know! Your voice matters!

Since I’m going to revisit this post in the future, I’m definitely hoping that I’ll be able to provide a more comprehensive analysis of merchant adoption.

Community

One of the best aspects of Zano is the community. To my mind, it’s one of the most important aspects of a project. It’s the community which drives the effort for merchant adoption, ease-of-use, scaling, community outreach, and more! The people are the lifeblood of the blockchain. It happens that every now and then I’ll come across an interesting project and hit the socials but find that they’re a ghost town. That isn’t Zano.

People are actively participating in growing the network, using the tech, and interacting with each other about the project. This really bodes well for it’s future. The more people discover the Zano, the more, I believe, they’ll see it’s strengths and want to share it with others. You should check out the available online communities here.

Staking

If you’re looking for passive income and want to help secure the network, Zano employs confidential staking. This means whatever Zano you hold in your desktop Zano Wallet can become a source of income just by letting it sit. For merchants and, well, anyone else, this could be a really great way to earn Zano passively. Just load the wallet and flip the switch.

See the Switch? Flip it to stake Zano. It couldn’t be easier. Image from Zano Desktop Wallet

Mining

If you’re a bit more technically inclined you can secure the network by mining Zano and earn Zano passively this way.

Confidential Assets (aka private tokens)

Confidential Assets are essentially tokens that have all the privacy as the native Zano token itself. This means they can be traded privately. What’s more, anyone can mint their own confidential assets to do basically whatever they want! It’s actually pretty easy to do now right in the mobile wallet.

Create a Confidential Asset using your phone!

Recently, the first tokenized Goldback was exchanged on the network. Someone created a digital version of a Goldback by minting a confidential asset. They added a picture of the Goldback to it, so people could see an image of the physical asset. Then, someone else bought this digital coin using Zano’s cryptocurrency. Presumably, the Goldback can be redeemed.

Think of it like a paper certificate used during the Gold Standard. Except the certificate was a private token representing the physical Goldback. In blockchain parlance this is called “tokenization”. This allows the buyer of the Goldback to own a digital certificate (token, really) verifying their ownership of the Goldback.

This has powerful financial implications. You could say the token was backed by physical gold. This opens the door to the possibility of creating stablecoins and even metal-backed private tokens. In theory, you could become a metals dealer using Zano where all the assets are privately tokenized for authenticity.

Furthermore, this technology allows you to do wild things like tokenize your house, or land, and putting it up for private sale on Zano. The creation of these tokens and transactions are timestamped so you could use it as a form of validation for land deeds ensuring you’re the owner. You can do this right now with Zano!

Confidential assets are a powerful tool you can take advantage of right now using Zano. All you have to do is think of a use and do it!

How Get Zano

The best resource is to check out ZanoList’s list of exchanges here. If you’re not sure of the way to do it here’s how:

Get yourself a Zano Wallet
Visit the list of exchanges– many of them are KYC free
Send your Zano to your wallet

Do note that if you’re new to cryptocurrency, you’ll need crypto to swap for Zano on an exchange. Alternatively, if you have the desire to do so, you could mine Zano and earn it that way as well. Lastly, you could become a merchant yourself and sell things for Zano.

If you have questions you have several communities to choose from:

Aliases

Ok, this is a cool feature. On Zano, you have your long public wallet address which can look like this:
ZxDskQm2MLP2BUYjf1T38fKQuFaep1MAoHZevNVWpVeZULGm54qBXTJ5YPmWMjAfNeLWnyjyf47GE55KwFGMsxsq2BCNNup5s

But it’s kind of hard to give someone your address if they ask for it without copy/paste. You can’t exactly memorize it either.

For convenience, Zano has a feature called an Alias. You can register a unique username… er… alias… and give that to people. When people go to send ZANO, they enter the alias instead of the unreadable above.

Aquarian Metals registered one. It’s simple: aquarian

And you can register or edit an alias right from your mobile or desktop wallet.

When I talk about adoption, convenience, and ease-of-use being necessary to be a medium of exchange… I’m talking about stuff like this. Aliases are an amazing feature which helps ensure anyone can use Zano.

For the Nerds

Privacy Tech

Zano employs cryptographic techniques like d/v-CLSAG Ring Signatures, Stealth Addresses, and RingCT to ensure complete privacy for its users. These features make transactions on Zano virtually untraceable, providing users with complete confidentiality for their financial transactions. If you’re tech minded, these are fascinating topics. You won’t be disappointed.

Scalability and Security

Zano’s hybrid consensus algorithm, combining Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS), offers a robust security framework that protects against 51% attacks. As the network adapts between PoW and PoS blocks, Zano enhances its security while maintaining high levels of decentralization.

It appears the Zano team is investigating the use of sharding, a scalability technology that would allow Zano to scale with demand.

Personally, I really hope they implement this in the future as it would have the potential make Zano scale better than all other privacy tokens which is extremely important for adoption and bringing sound money to the world for the masses. The tech is extremely complex so I get that implementing it might be a long shot, but, man, it’s worth trying for the scaling advantages alone.

Ionic Swaps & Escrow Contracts

Zano’s Ionic Swaps and Escrow Contracts further bolster the ecosystem by enabling secure, peer-to-peer transactions without compromising privacy. These features empower users to create fully customizable contracts and participate in trustless settlements, reducing reliance on intermediaries.

Together these Swaps and Contracts allow people to build very powerful applications.

Zano

I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next for Zano. With it’s private, uncensorable transactions, confidential assets, easy to use tools, and steadily growing community, Zano has all the makings to be a major currency in the space. As the tools, applications, and use cases continue to expand, I expect to see Zano in unexpected places.

I didn’t mention their roadmap but you can check it out here. Looks like a lot of really great features are coming down the line.

I’m pretty excited about Zano. Sound money is hard to find. It’s important to highlight them when they come along.

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