Other existing solutions utilize either coin mixing or ring signatures. Coin mixing in many current implementations involve a lot of trust on the mixer and rely on finding other people to mix with which can take time. Ring signatures are a lot better in that it finds similar transactions of similar denominations to mix with but it means that there's still an element of traceability since the real transaction path is still somewhere in there and other outside data and topological analysis may narrow this down further.

https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/How-does-Zcoin-compare-to-other-anonymity-methods%3F

Zcoin users Zerocoin technology which means when you mint a zcoin (anonymize it) and then spend it (creating a new coin with no transaction history), there is no 'transaction path' to follow. To understand this further, read below:

https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/A-layman's-explanation-on-how-Zerocoin-works

One of the benefits of Zcoin in still using Bitcoin's core code and the anonymity layer does not affect this too much meaning it can integrate into the existing Bitcoin ecosystem much more easily compared to other privacy coins (besides Dash) which require much more modification to allow it to happen. This can be evidenced by coinpayments.net only taking less than a day to enable support for the coin and work is being done to integrate Zcoin with the copay wallet.


Not yet and not intended to be a GPU mineable coin in the short term.