It seems like BTCZ is over? Extremely low net hash and trade rate. No any activity from developpers...
BTCZ is not over at all, still young that's it. From my pov this ANN is good for technical things (wallet, mining, ideas for community...)
If you want fresh feed, you can join the Slack:
http://slack.bitcoinz.global really great with devs over there.
As a second good source of news i use twitter:
https://twitter.com/BitcoinZTeamHope it help and long life to BitcoinZ
What differendes in technical from Zcash, zcl and any other clones on equihash? Wallet is the same unprotected w/o encryption or any pay password (node wallet).