The highly anticipated launch of ZCash was significantly overhyped, particularly on cryptocurrency exchanges including Poloniex, which currently demonstrate a price of nearly 9 BTC, a value worth around $6300 per ZEC (ZCash).
Despite its high value and support from various investment firms including Pantera Capital and Digital Currency Group, it has already triggered some major discussions and criticisms on its principles and mining mechanism.
Controversy
Upon the launch of ZCash, Poloniex and other prominent cryptocurrency exchanges placed a value of $20,000 per ZEC, considering its limited circulation. However, its price rapidly decreased over the past 9 hours by nearly 100%, declining to $9,000 and $6,000 on some exchanges like ShapeShift.
While most users and ZCash supporters argue that it is the exchanges like Poloniex that are pushing the price up purposely, the majority of cryptocurrency experts and communities unanimously agree that the average price of ZCash in the short term will be placed at around 0.1 BTC.
Zcash average price at the first month.
— Frisb (@pterion2910) October 15, 2016
Because of the optimism revolving around the value of ZCash, futures trading on the digital currency have increased in popularity amongst cryptocurrency investors. Various exchanges and trading platforms including BitMEX have launched futures trading option for ZCash.
The volume of futures trading in ZCash is rapidly increasing due to the pre-sale of ZEC, which was initiated by the development team to raise capital to fund operations. Simon Dixon’s BNK to the Future also conducted a crowdfunding campaign for ZCash mining, in which investors funded to receive ZEC through a portion of each block reward.
However, this pre-sale and the 10 percent Devmine share of the ZCash network has led to controversial arguments in the cryptocurrency community, as experts began to question the legitimacy of ZCash and its mining mechanism. An increasing number of users have also criticized ZCash by comparing it to Monero, the leading anonymity and privacy-focused digital currency.
Exchange support
Major Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges such as Kraken and Bitfinex have either already begun to accept orders for ZEC or released statements for ZEC support in the near future. Bitfinex began to accept orders for ZEC on Oct. 28, almost immediately after the launch of ZEC.
Order books for ZECBTC and ZECUSD are now open and accepting bids. Deposit will be open after Zcash Genesis block is mined
— Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) October 28, 2016
Kraken also enabled trading for its users and according to various Bitcoin and cryptocurrency market data providers like BraveNewCoin, it is becoming one of the largest ZEC trading platforms behind Poloniex.