Guides & explainers
Guides
In-depth, plain-English guides to evaluating exchanges, securing your wallet, and using crypto safely.
Independently written — no sponsor input
29 guides
An ETF Share or the Coin Itself
Both track the same price and they are not the same asset. What each one actually makes you own, the three-way choice most people mistake for a two-way one, and which risk you are picking up.
Read the briefAPI Keys and Third-Party Trading Tools
Bots, trackers and tax tools all ask for exchange API keys. What each permission actually grants, and the one you should almost never hand over.
Read the briefBridging Crypto Between Chains Without Losing It
A bridge is a custody decision dressed up as a transfer. What the three designs actually do with your coin, why bridges are the most attacked component in crypto, and the checks that survive all of them.
Read the briefHow to Check a Crypto Address Before You Send
A crypto transfer cannot be recalled, and the most common way people lose money is sending to an address that was never the one they meant. Here is the check that catches it.
Read the briefThe Crypto Records to Keep Before Tax Time
What you owe is set where you live, and this page does not touch it. What travels between jurisdictions is the record-keeping — and the fact that exchanges are not archives.
Read the briefCustodial vs Non-Custodial Wallets Explained
The single biggest decision in how you hold crypto: who controls the keys, and what that means for security and responsibility.
Read the briefHow to Evaluate a Crypto Exchange's Safety
Before you deposit a dollar, run any exchange through this checklist — proof-of-reserves, custody model, licensing, and security track record.
Read the briefHardware Wallets Explained
What a hardware wallet actually protects you from, what it does not, and how to buy and set one up without undoing the point of owning it.
Read the briefHow Crypto Withdrawals Work
Networks, addresses, confirmations and fees — what actually happens when you withdraw crypto, and the mistakes that make it unrecoverable.
Read the briefHow to Buy Bitcoin for the First Time
The purchase takes ten minutes. What takes longer are the four decisions around it: where the coin will live, which venue may legally sell to you, and what the quote really costs.
Read the briefHow to Check a Token Before You Buy
Six checks you can run yourself on any token, with a block explorer and the contract. None of them require trusting the project's own description.
Read the briefHow to Check an Exchange Licence Claim
A licence badge in a footer is a claim, not evidence. Four steps to verify it against the register, and what the answer does and does not cover.
Read the briefHow to Read a Crypto Whitepaper
A whitepaper has no standard, no reviewer and no obligation to stay true. What to read first, what to verify elsewhere, and which sections to skip.
Read the briefHow to Spot a Crypto Scam
The patterns behind almost every crypto scam are older than crypto. Learn the five that keep working, and the checks that defuse them.
Read the briefHow to Trade Crypto Futures, Starting With the Risk
A perpetual costs you money whether you are right or wrong, and the venue picks the moment your position closes. The numbers to know before the entry, not after it.
Read the briefMarket Cap and Supply, Explained
Why a coin's unit price tells you nothing, what market cap actually measures, and the supply figures that quietly change the answer.
Read the briefProof of Reserves Explained
What a proof-of-reserves report actually proves, what it quietly leaves out, and how to read one without mistaking it for a full audit.
Read the briefHow to Read a Block Explorer
A block explorer is the public record every claim about a transaction can be checked against. What the fields mean, and the three things worth verifying yourself.
Read the briefHow to Store a Seed Phrase Safely
Your recovery phrase is the account. Here is how to back it up so a fire, a flood, a thief or a phishing site cannot take your crypto with it.
Read the briefToken Approvals and How to Revoke Them
Most wallet drains are not stolen keys. They are permissions the owner granted once and forgot. Here is what an approval is and how to take it back.
Read the briefTwo-Factor Authentication for Crypto Accounts
Not all second factors are equal. Why SMS codes are the weakest option, what a security key does that an app cannot, and what to fix first.
Read the briefUnderstanding Crypto Exchange Fees
Trading fees are the smallest part of what an exchange charges you. Here is where the rest of the cost hides, and how to measure it.
Read the briefWhat a Smart Contract Audit Does and Does Not Prove
An audit is a review with a scope and a date, not a guarantee. How to read one, and the four things a badge on a website never tells you.
Read the briefWhat Actually Backs a Stablecoin
A stablecoin is only as stable as whatever stands behind it. The three designs, what an attestation does and does not prove, and the question that matters most.
Read the briefWhat Happens When a Crypto Exchange Fails
If an exchange freezes withdrawals or files for bankruptcy, what actually happens to your balance — and what you can do before that day.
Read the briefWhat Staking Actually Involves
Staking is not a savings account. What you commit, what can reduce it, and the difference between doing it yourself and letting a platform do it.
Read the briefWhat to Do If Your Wallet Is Drained
The first hour matters, and instinct gives the wrong advice. What can still be saved, what cannot, and why recovery services make it worse.
Read the briefWhen an Exchange Freezes Your Withdrawal
Most frozen withdrawals are a compliance review, not a collapse. How to tell which one you are in, what shortens a hold, and the signals that mean stop waiting.
Read the briefWhy a Transaction Is Stuck, and What to Do
A pending transaction has not failed and has not happened. Why fees, ordering and nonces leave transactions waiting, and which fixes are real.
Read the briefBeyond exchanges
Coin guides
Plain-English risk levels for the assets people ask about most — not investment advice, just what to know before you buy.
Aave
DeFi governance token
A decentralised lending protocol where deposits sit in shared pools and borrowers take overcollateralised loans against assets they lock, with interest rates set by how much of a pool is in use.
Why this risk level
- Loans are overcollateralised and enforced by contract: if the value of your collateral falls far enough relative to what you borrowed, anyone may liquidate part of the position and take a bonus for doing it
- Deposits are not insured — the risks are smart-contract failure, an oracle reporting a wrong price, and market moves too fast for liquidators to clear bad debt
- AAVE is a governance token used to vote on protocol parameters and to backstop the system under its safety module; it is not a deposit account and not a claim on the pools
Algorand
Smart-contract platform
A smart-contract network whose consensus draws a fresh random committee for every block and finalises it on the spot, so the chain never reorganises and confirmations are not a waiting game.
Why this risk level
- Block producers and voters are selected by a cryptographic lottery weighted by stake, and the selection is verifiable after the fact but not predictable in advance, which is what makes targeting a specific proposer difficult
- Finality is immediate rather than probabilistic: once a block is agreed it is not revisited, so applications do not need a confirmation count before treating a payment as settled
- ALGO pays transaction fees and is the stake that weights the lottery; participation does not require locking coins away from the account that holds them
Aptos
Smart-contract platform
A proof-of-stake layer-1 launched in October 2022 by engineers from Meta's abandoned Diem project, built around the Move programming language and an execution engine that processes independent transactions in parallel rather than one after another.
Why this risk level
- Move is the distinguishing feature rather than the marketing: assets are represented as typed resources that the language itself forbids from being copied or silently discarded, which removes at the language level a category of bug that Solidity contracts have to be audited for
- The pitch is parallel execution — transactions that do not touch the same state are processed simultaneously — so throughput claims should be read as a ceiling under favourable conditions rather than a rate you will observe on a busy day
- The chain launched with a large share of the supply allocated to the core team, early investors and the foundation, released on a multi-year unlock schedule, so circulating supply has risen on a published timetable independently of demand
- It competes directly with several other well-funded Move and parallel-execution chains for the same developers, and an ecosystem's depth — not its benchmark numbers — is what determines whether a chain retains them
Arbitrum
Scaling network
An optimistic rollup that executes transactions off the Ethereum main chain and posts the results back to it, so users pay Ethereum-level security costs only once per batch.
Why this risk level
- Transactions are ordered by a sequencer and settled on Ethereum, so fees are far lower than transacting on Ethereum directly while the final record still lives there
- Withdrawals back to Ethereum pass through a challenge window measured in days, during which a fraud proof can dispute the posted result — bridges that offer instant exits are third parties taking that risk for a fee
- ARB is a governance token for the protocol's DAO; it is not the network's gas token and does not confer a share of sequencer revenue
Avalanche
Smart-contract platform
A proof-of-stake smart-contract platform designed around fast transaction finality and the ability for projects to run their own separate, application-specific chains.
Why this risk level
- Transactions reach final settlement in seconds rather than minutes
- Projects can launch their own chains with custom rules instead of sharing one congested network
- The developer and application ecosystem is meaningfully smaller than Ethereum's, which affects both available liquidity and the maturity of the tooling
Bitcoin
Store of value
The original cryptocurrency and still the largest by market value, with over fifteen years of continuous operation and no successful attack on its core network.
Why this risk level
- Longest track record of any crypto asset by a wide margin
- Most decentralized and battle-tested validator (miner) set
- Still far more volatile than traditional stores of value like gold or bonds
- Supply is capped at 21 million coins — the scarcity argument rests on that cap, not on any yield the asset pays
Bitcoin Cash
Payments
A network created by a 2017 hard fork of Bitcoin, taking the opposite side of a long argument about whether to scale by enlarging blocks or by moving activity to other layers.
Why this risk level
- Larger blocks fit more transactions per block, which keeps on-chain fees low while activity is modest; the cost is a heavier chain to store and relay, which raises the bar for running a full node over time
- The fork was contentious rather than technical housekeeping: everyone holding at the fork block held on both chains afterwards, and the two have followed separate development paths since
- BCH pays fees and is the unit of account on its own chain; it is a distinct asset from BTC despite the shared history and the similar proof-of-work design
BNB
Exchange token
The token issued by Binance: it discounts trading fees on the exchange and pays transaction costs on BNB Chain, so its usefulness is tied to one company.
Why this risk level
- Its main uses — fee discounts and BNB Chain gas — both depend on Binance's own products
- Regulatory action against the issuing exchange is a direct risk to the token, not a separate one
- Supply is reduced by scheduled burns run by the issuer rather than by a fixed protocol rule
Cardano
Smart-contract platform
A proof-of-stake smart-contract platform whose development is driven by peer-reviewed academic research, which makes it deliberate and slow-moving by design rather than by accident.
Why this risk level
- Ran proof-of-stake from launch, years before Ethereum switched to it
- Smart contracts only arrived in 2021, well after the network itself launched
- The research-first process trades shipping speed for formal review — judge it on delivered features, not roadmaps
Celestia
Data availability network
A network launched in October 2023 that does one job on purpose: it accepts data from other chains, orders it and guarantees it was actually published, leaving execution and settlement to whoever builds on top.
Why this risk level
- It is the clearest working example of the modular thesis — that ordering data, executing transactions and settling results need not happen on the same chain — so understanding Celestia is largely understanding whether that separation is worth its extra moving parts
- Light clients use data availability sampling, downloading small random pieces of each block to gain statistical confidence that the whole block was published, which is what lets ordinary hardware verify publication without storing everything
- TIA's demand is unusually legible: it is paid for blockspace by the rollups that post data there, so the asset's usage tracks the number and activity of chains that chose this network rather than an application economy of its own
- That same clarity is the risk. Data availability is a competitive market with well-funded alternatives including Ethereum's own blob capacity, and a rollup can migrate its data layer far more easily than users can migrate a chain
Chainlink
Oracle network
A network of independent operators that delivers outside information — most often prices — into smart contracts, which cannot fetch data on their own.
Why this risk level
- Smart contracts have no way to read the outside world, so an oracle is infrastructure, not decoration
- LINK is what pays the node operators who supply and secure that data
- It is a service layer rather than a blockchain, so its usage rises and falls with the DeFi apps built on top
Cosmos
Interoperability network
A framework and messaging standard for building independent blockchains that can pass tokens and messages to one another, rather than a single chain that hosts every application.
Why this risk level
- Chains built with the Cosmos SDK run their own validators and set their own rules, so a problem on one does not automatically become a problem on the others
- The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol moves assets between connected chains without a custodian holding them in the middle
- ATOM secures and governs the Cosmos Hub specifically — it is not a claim on the other chains in the ecosystem, and holding it does not entitle you to their fees
Curve DAO
DeFi governance token
A decentralised exchange launched in 2020 and specialised in swapping assets that are supposed to trade at the same value — stablecoins, staked and unstaked versions of the same coin — plus a governance token whose influence is bought with time rather than size alone.
Why this risk level
- Its pricing curve is the point: an exchange designed for assets expected to stay near parity can concentrate liquidity around that parity and quote far tighter prices than a general-purpose pool, which is why stablecoin swaps and staked-asset pairs congregated there
- CRV introduced vote-escrow to DeFi — lock the token for a period up to several years and receive voting power and boosted rewards in proportion to the time committed — a design widely copied because it prices governance influence in patience instead of purely in capital
- Because those votes direct where token emissions flow, other protocols bid for them, creating a secondary market in Curve governance that is a case study in how one protocol's incentives become another's operating cost
- The history is instructive on risk rather than reassuring: a July 2023 reentrancy exploit hit pools built with specific affected compiler versions, and later that year the founder's large CRV-backed borrowings became a market-wide stress event in their own right
Dogecoin
Meme coin
Started in 2013 as a joke based on an internet meme, with no roadmap or scarcity mechanism comparable to Bitcoin's — its price is driven almost entirely by sentiment.
Why this risk level
- Unlimited supply — there is no maximum cap, unlike Bitcoin's fixed 21 million
- Price history is dominated by social-media-driven spikes and crashes
- Treat it as pure speculation on attention and sentiment, not an investment thesis
Ethereum
Smart-contract platform
The leading platform for smart contracts and decentralized apps — most of DeFi, NFTs and stablecoin activity runs on it or a network derived from it.
Why this risk level
- Large, active developer ecosystem and the deepest liquidity outside Bitcoin
- Moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, cutting its energy use by well over 99%
- Network fees can spike sharply during congestion, and smart-contract bugs are a real risk for anything built on top
Ethereum Classic
Smart-contract platform
The continuation of the original Ethereum ledger by participants who rejected the 2016 hard fork that reversed The DAO theft, on the principle that a ledger should not be rewritten.
Why this risk level
- Both chains share every block before the split, so the difference is not the technology but a decision about whether an exceptional intervention was legitimate
- Ethereum Classic kept proof of work when Ethereum moved to proof of stake, and a smaller share of mining power makes a chain cheaper to attack — this network has suffered documented deep reorganisations
- ETC pays gas on its own chain and is a separate asset from ETH; the two have not shared an upgrade path since 2016
Filecoin
Storage network
A network that turns file storage into an open market: clients pay providers to hold data, and providers must keep proving to the chain that the data is still there.
Why this risk level
- A storage deal is enforced by two cryptographic proofs — one that the provider encoded the client's specific data, and one submitted repeatedly over time that they still hold it — with staked collateral slashed for failing them
- The chain stores the deals and the proofs, not the files, so retrieval speed and availability depend on the provider you contracted with rather than on the protocol
- FIL pays for deals and gas and is the collateral providers must lock to take on storage; the price of a deal is negotiated in the market rather than set by the protocol
Hedera
Smart-contract platform
A public ledger that records transactions in a gossip-based graph rather than a chain of blocks, and whose consensus nodes are run by a defined council of named organisations.
Why this risk level
- Consensus comes from nodes gossiping about what they heard and when, from which each node can compute the same ordering without a leader — a different construction from a chain of blocks, with fast finality as the design goal
- Governance is explicitly not open: a council of named organisations operates the consensus nodes and votes on protocol and pricing, which is a trade of permissionless participation for accountable, identified operators
- HBAR pays transaction and service fees and is the asset staked to nodes; the network exposes fixed-fee services such as consensus timestamping and token issuance alongside EVM-compatible contracts
Lido DAO
Liquid staking
A protocol that pools deposited ether, stakes it through a curated set of node operators, and issues a transferable token that represents the staked position.
Why this risk level
- Staking directly means running or trusting a validator and accepting that the stake is not liquid; the protocol's answer is a receipt token that can be moved and used elsewhere while the underlying stake stays with the validators
- The risks are stacked: the smart contracts, the operator set chosen by governance, validator penalties, and the possibility that the receipt token trades away from the value of what it represents
- LDO is a governance token, not the staked asset — it votes on the operator set and protocol parameters and does not itself carry a claim on staked ether
Litecoin
Payments
One of the oldest surviving cryptocurrencies, launched in 2011 from Bitcoin's codebase with faster blocks and a larger maximum supply.
Why this risk level
- Running with few protocol changes since 2011 gives it an unusually long, uneventful uptime record
- Blocks arrive roughly every 2.5 minutes against Bitcoin's ten, and the supply cap is 84 million rather than 21 million
- It has far less developer activity and narrower merchant use than its age might suggest
Monero
Privacy
A network that conceals sender, receiver and amount by default, unlike Bitcoin, where every transaction is permanently public and traceable.
Why this risk level
- Privacy is the default rather than an option a user has to switch on
- Many regulated exchanges have delisted it, so buying and selling can be harder and less liquid
- The same properties that protect ordinary users also attract regulatory scrutiny in most major markets
NEAR Protocol
Smart-contract platform
A proof-of-stake smart-contract platform that splits its workload across shards and uses readable account names instead of raw hexadecimal addresses.
Why this risk level
- Accounts can be human-readable names rather than long hex strings, which removes some of the copy-paste risk but introduces the familiar problem of lookalike names
- An account can hold several access keys with different permissions, so a key limited to one contract can be used day to day while a full-access key stays offline
- NEAR pays transaction fees and is staked to validators; delegating it carries slashing and lock-up conditions set by the protocol, not by whoever markets the yield
Optimism
Scaling network
An optimistic rollup that executes transactions off Ethereum and settles them there, built on an openly published stack that other networks also run.
Why this risk level
- Fees are paid in ether on the rollup rather than in OP, and the transactions still settle to Ethereum, which is where the final record lives
- Withdrawing directly to Ethereum passes through a challenge period measured in days; anything faster is a third-party bridge or liquidity provider taking that risk for a fee
- OP is a governance token in the Optimism Collective, including funding decisions for shared infrastructure — it is not a share of any chain's fee income
Polkadot
Interoperability network
A network where separate specialised chains connect to a central relay chain and borrow its security instead of each having to recruit validators alone.
Why this risk level
- A new chain inherits the shared validator set rather than bootstrapping its own security from zero
- The way connected chains get and keep their slot has been redesigned more than once, so check current rules
- Building on it requires a specific technical stack, which narrows the pool of developers compared with Ethereum tooling
Polygon
Scaling network
A scaling network that processes transactions cheaply alongside Ethereum, aimed at applications for which Ethereum's own fees are prohibitive.
Why this risk level
- Transaction costs are a small fraction of Ethereum's, which makes small everyday transfers practical
- Its main chain runs its own validator set, so it does not inherit Ethereum's security wholesale
- The network token was renamed and migrated from MATIC to POL, so older guides and tickers can mislead
Shiba Inu
Meme coin
A meme token launched on Ethereum in 2020 with an extremely large supply, whose price is driven by social attention rather than by any underlying revenue.
Why this risk level
- It is an ordinary Ethereum token, not its own blockchain, and was created without any funding round or product
- The supply is enormous, so a very low unit price says nothing about how cheap it is
- Treat it as a bet on continued attention — there is no cash flow or protocol fee underneath it
Solana
Smart-contract platform
A high-throughput blockchain built for speed and low transaction fees, popular for trading apps and consumer-facing crypto products.
Why this risk level
- Has suffered multiple network outages over its history, some lasting hours
- Price has historically swung more sharply than Bitcoin or Ethereum across market cycles
- Faster and growing, but with a more concentrated validator set than Ethereum today
- Everything runs on one chain rather than on rollups above it, so an outage stops the whole network at once rather than a single layer
Stablecoins
Stablecoin
Tokens designed to track the value of a fiat currency, usually the US dollar — useful for moving value without crypto's usual price swings, but you're trusting the issuer's reserves.
Why this risk level
- Value is only as solid as the issuer's reserve backing and how often it's audited
- Major issuers publish reserve attestations at different frequencies and levels of detail — read them before relying on one
- A stable price is not the same as a risk-free asset; issuer or regulatory problems can still break the peg
Stellar
Payments
A payment-focused ledger designed to move value between currencies, where assets other than its native token are issued by named organisations that promise redemption.
Why this risk level
- Holding an issued asset on Stellar means opening a trustline to that issuer, so the credit risk is the issuer's — the ledger records the balance but does not guarantee the redemption behind it
- Consensus comes from a federated agreement between chosen validator sets rather than mining, so transactions settle in seconds and fees are a small fixed amount rather than an auction
- XLM pays those fees, meets the minimum balance every account must hold, and is the bridge asset for path payments; it is not a claim on any issuer's reserves
Sui
Smart-contract platform
A smart-contract network that models state as individually owned objects rather than one global account table, which lets transactions that touch nothing in common be processed at the same time.
Why this risk level
- A transfer involving only objects one address owns does not need the network to agree on an ordering against everyone else's transactions, so it can take a faster settlement path than one touching shared state
- Contracts are written in Move, a language designed so that assets are types the compiler tracks — a resource cannot be silently copied or dropped, which removes a family of bugs at the language level rather than the audit level
- SUI pays gas and is staked to validators; storage is paid for up front with a portion refunded when data is deleted, so the cost model differs from chains that charge only per transaction
Tezos
Smart-contract platform
A smart-contract network built so that changes to its own protocol are proposed, voted on and installed by the chain itself, rather than agreed off-chain and shipped as a fork.
Why this risk level
- Amendments run through fixed on-chain periods — proposal, exploration, testing, promotion — so an upgrade either passes the vote or does not happen, and the chain does not split into two versions
- Consensus is proof-of-stake: holders may run a validator or delegate their stake to one without transferring ownership of the coins, and validators face penalties for signing conflicting blocks
- XTZ pays transaction fees, is the asset that is staked or delegated, and is the unit that voting weight is measured in — governance rights come from stake rather than from a separate token
The Graph
Indexing network
A network that indexes blockchain data into queryable APIs called subgraphs, so applications can ask structured questions instead of scanning every block themselves.
Why this risk level
- Reading raw chain data is slow and awkward, so indexers run the software that transforms it into a queryable form and are paid query fees for serving results
- Accuracy is backed by stake: indexers lock tokens that can be slashed if they are shown to have served incorrect data, and curators and delegators signal which subgraphs and indexers deserve traffic
- GRT is the staking asset and the unit query fees are paid in; the network serves data about other chains and does not settle transactions of its own
Toncoin
Smart-contract platform
A smart-contract network whose design splits work across many shards, with contracts communicating by asynchronous messages rather than direct calls within one global state.
Why this risk level
- Shards can split and merge with load, which is the network's answer to congestion, and it means throughput is a property of how work distributes rather than of one shared queue
- Contracts talk by sending messages that arrive later, so developers cannot assume a call and its result happen in the same instant — a real difference from EVM-style programming that changes how applications are written
- TON pays fees, is staked by validators, and is used for the network's naming and storage services; the project originated at Telegram, was abandoned by the company after a US regulatory action, and has since been continued by an independent community
TRON
Smart-contract platform
A smart-contract network known mainly for cheap, fast stablecoin transfers, secured by a small elected set of validators rather than an open one.
Why this risk level
- Carries a very large share of global USDT transfer volume because fees are low
- Block production sits with a small elected validator set, so control is far more concentrated than on Bitcoin or Ethereum
- Closely associated with founder Justin Sun, whose ventures have drawn repeated regulatory attention
Uniswap
DeFi governance token
The governance token of one of the largest decentralised exchanges, where trades are executed by smart contracts rather than by a company's order book.
Why this risk level
- The protocol runs on-chain, so you trade from your own wallet without depositing with a custodian
- UNI grants votes on protocol decisions, not an automatic share of the fees traders pay
- Trading on it exposes you to smart-contract risk and to whatever token you choose to swap into
VeChain
Supply-chain network
A chain aimed at enterprise record-keeping — product provenance, logistics, certification — built on a two-token model that separates the asset held from the asset spent on fees.
Why this risk level
- Holding VET generates a second token over time, and that second token is what pays for transactions, so an application's running cost is decoupled from the market price of the asset its operator holds
- The consensus is an authority model: a limited set of known, vetted masternodes produces blocks, which suits organisations that want an identifiable operator set and is a deliberate step away from open participation
- The chain records claims that originate off it — a scan, a sensor reading, a certificate — so its guarantee is that a record was not altered afterwards, not that the record was true when written
Wrapped Bitcoin
Wrapped asset
An Ethereum token meant to be backed one-for-one by bitcoin held in custody, so bitcoin can be used inside Ethereum applications.
Why this risk level
- It lets bitcoin act as collateral in Ethereum DeFi, which the Bitcoin network itself cannot do
- You hold a claim on a custodian's reserves, not bitcoin — the custodian is the single point of failure
- The custody arrangements behind it have changed since launch, so confirm who holds the backing today
XRP
Payments
Designed for fast, low-cost cross-border settlement, and closely tied to Ripple, the company most associated with promoting it.
Why this risk level
- Years of US regulatory uncertainty preceded a 2023 court ruling that clarified some — not all — aspects of its legal status
- Price and trading volume are heavily influenced by the issuing company's own actions and announcements
- Real-world payment adoption claims are easy to overstate — read past the headlines
Zcash
Privacy
A payments chain that offers two kinds of address — transparent, which behaves like Bitcoin, and shielded, where a zero-knowledge proof validates a transfer without revealing sender, receiver or amount.
Why this risk level
- A shielded transaction proves to the network that it is valid and balanced without publishing what it contains, which is a different approach from mixing transactions together to obscure them
- Privacy is opt-in, so the size of the shielded pool matters: value moved between a transparent and a shielded address leaves a visible edge, and a mostly-transparent chain gives shielded users a smaller crowd to blend into
- ZEC pays fees and is the transferred asset; the same coin can sit in either kind of address, and the choice of address is what determines what the chain reveals