Cloakcoin ( CLOAK ) isn ’ t a coin you hear about very much these days, but it is one of the older cryptocurrencies, having been launched back in 2014 .It is a wholly plug, in full private and untraceable digital cash with full fungibilty ( all coins equivalent ). Cloakcoin is able to achieve this privacy through the practice of an offchain coin mixing system called “ Enigma ”
however, with so many better known privacy coins such as ZCash and Monero, can Cloackcoin actually compete ?
In this Cloakcoin review we will take an a deep prima donna on the project by looking at the engineering, team, development and roadmap. We will besides analyse the retentive term use cases for the CLOAK token and its likely for larger adoption.
Cloakcoin Features
once you see the features that Cloakcoin brings to the postpone you might agree that it has been reasonably look out on. Or you might see why it is being overlooked. Let ’ s get an idea of what advantages you might get from using Cloakcoin .
Faster Transactions – Cloakcoin was designed with 60 second block times, making it ten times faster than Bitcoin in processing transactions. Of path it doesn ’ t have the volumes of major coins so far, so we have to wait to see how it would perform under much heavier transaction volumes .
Completely Anonymous and Private – This is where Cloakcoin shines. User identity is never revealed when transacting with Cloakcoin, making it one of the most secure of the privacy coins. It achieves this through its proprietorship Enigma engineering, which will be discussed in more depth late .
Safe and Secure – The combination of open-source blockchain technology guarantees the security and guard of Cloakcoin .
Decentralization – Cloakcoin is amply decentralized, using proof-of-stake mine to secure the network. This decentralization and PoS system besides provides an bonus for users to hold coins in their wallets in a process called impale .
Staking Rewards – Any user who chooses to hold CLOAK in their wallet can stake those coins and receive a reward for doing then. Staking rewards sum to 6 % annual return, which is the incentive for users to help secure the network. Users can besides elect to process Enigma transactions to get extra rewards .
User Friendly – This is an much overlook aspect of many blockchains and cryptocurrencies, but the truth is most people aren ’ triiodothyronine going to use overly-complicated systems. Cloakcoin is user-friendly and bare to grasp. There are no detail technical instructions, and users can be sending and receiving CLOAK anonymously within minutes of installing their wallet .
Cloakcoin from the beginning
As was mentioned early Cloakcoin was developed and released in 2014, although it has undergo major improvements since that initial free. One matter that hasn ’ triiodothyronine changed over the years though is the decentralized and circulate nature of Cloakcoin .
even more importantly is the development of the privacy function of Cloakcoin. With the upgrade to Enigma, Cloakcoin became a complete and sum anonymous privacy mint. Unlike early coins there is no way to follow a lead on the blockchain to determine where CLOAK tokens may have come from. User privacy is constantly protected and the exchangeability of the currentness is maintained .
The evolution of Cloakcoin technology. Image via Cloakcoin Website The execution of a hybrid Proof-of-Work / Proof of Stake consensus system ensures users have an incentive to hold CLOAK coins, helping to lift the value of the cryptocurrency, and to help secure the network by processing Enigma transactions .
Adding to the comfort of use for Cloakcoin users is a native wallet that allows users to easily send, receive, store and bet on their CLOAK. Staking CLOAK yields a 6 % annual return .
Like other forms of digital currency CLOAK can be exchanged easily on the open grocery store and can be used a mean of payment for those that accept CLOAK tokens. These payments allow users to “ dissemble ” the transaction, hiding any association between buyers and sellers. This is accomplished via an imaginative mint mixing arrangement dubbed “ Enigma ” .
ENIGMA Technology and Privacy
Cloakcoin has CloakShield, which is an onion type protocol, enabled by default option to provide throughout encoding and guarantee communications for every transaction. This technology entirely allows nodes to avoid any analysis of the traffic routed through them. however at the adjacent level of privacy and anonymity is ENIGMA. This technology uses adenine many as 25 hops with symmetrical RSA encoding and an ECDH key exchange .
Overview of Enigma Transaction. Image via Cloakcoin Website ENIGMA was created by the Cloakcoin team and provides a batten and private means for conducting transactions on the blockchain. By using the unique ENIGMA engineering uses can be certain their coins are sent wholly anonymously, without the want to trust the nodes involved from stealing their funds or leaking their secret data .
The Cloakcoin team has besides emphasized that they do not support or condone the habit of their technology to conduct any type of illegal transaction or action .
The CLOAK Token
The CLOAK keepsake was launched in 2014, and by the middle of the year it was valued at $ 1.47. Like the respite of the market it cursorily dropped and was worth little over the come three years. then it rallied above $ 10 in June 2017 as cryptocurrencies began to explode. After spending much of the rest of 2017 deal between $ 3.50 and $ 10 it surged higher in December along with the broader commercialize and reached its all-time high of $ 35.99 on December 29, 2017 .
price declined throughout most of 2018, with the exception of the bounce experienced by the broader market in April. As of late December 2018 the CLOAK token is trading at $ 1.22, which is far from the heights reached just one class anterior. That said the coin has been advancing in the Market Cap rankings, and when the broader cryptocurrency market recovers Cloakcoin could be one of the leaders .
Register at Binance and Buy CLOAK Tokens Users are incentivized to use Cloakcoin in two ways. The forst is the Proof-of-Stake system that generates an annual revert of 6 % for those who venture their CLOAK tokens to secure the network. The second is the Proof-of-Work consensus used to secure the Enigma protocol which allows users to collect 1.8 % of the transaction fees generated during an Enigma transaction that they support .
There is presently a limited issue of just 5,235,507 CLOAK in circulation and because the Proof-of-Work mine phase for the coin is done there will be no more create. That alone makes CLOAK more valuable due to its limited provision .
CLOAK is available on several exchanges, with the largest trade book occurring on Binance. There is besides modest trade volumes on Livecoin and Bittrex. A few early small exchanges support the mint american samoa well .
Storing the CLOAK coins needs to be done in the native Cloakcoin Evolution wallet. This is the third wallet that ’ s been created since the origin of Cloakcoin in 2014, and it is highly user-friendly and simple to use. It is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Raspberry Pi and will soon be available as a web wallet.
User interface of the official Cloakcoin Wallet The wallet was evaluated by cybersecurity fast Cognosec as separate of an overall security audited account of Cloakcoin in January 2018. The wallet was found to be quite safe, although it was found that the wallet was storing transaction details unencrypted, which could compromise user privacy if the transaction details were somehow extracted by a hack. Cognosec recommended this be remedied in future versions of the wallet, and it was fixed with version 2.2.2.0 of the Evolution wallet .
Cloakcoin team
Cloakcoin seems to have a pretty big team comprised of members with a wide diverseness of know. Taking a look at the technical school talent, we have the two lead devs which are “ Deepend ” and “ anorak ” whose real names are William Danielson and Ante Beslic .
William is the Tech lead and is a C++ developer with two decades of experience in software mastermind. Ante is the wallet developer who has extensive experience in front end development. He worked extensively with William in club to shape Cloakcoin into what it is nowadays .
From Left: lasvegas89 (Steven Kendar), Deepend (William Danielson) and Anorak (Ante Beslic) The Cloakcoin undertaking director is “ lasvegas89 ” who ’ mho real name is Steven Kendar. He joined the Cloak project back in 2014 and was the right hand man of the then project director. He took over that function recently and is trying to push the Cloak project ahead .
There are a numeral of other team members which we wont go into here. What is interesting to note is that the Cloak project has focused a lot of attention on local anesthetic residential district co-ordinators and selling professionals. Hopefully this could increase awareness above the current levels .
Development Acitivity
In club to get a commodity sense of how much function is being done by the team, it helps to take a look at the stick out ’ south GitHub. The number of commits that a project has been making is able to give us a harsh reading. Taking a look at the CloakProject depository, we get the under overview .
Recent commits to the main Cloakproject Repositories While this does show that exploitation is still active voice, it appears to be quite sparse compared to some of the other projects that I have reviewed. indeed, if we were to take a front at the rankings of the number of commits of cloakcoin, it comes in at 279 .
Of course, Cloakcoin is a relatively established mint so there may not have been that much development completed when compared to some of the newer projects that are building new protocols. however, this could change once Cloakcoin starts working on some improvements that they have planned on the protocol .
Cloakcoin Roadmap
This further growth has been laid out in the Cloakcoin whitepaper where they plan to work on three main features of the protocol. These include three main components, two of which relate to the PoS algorithm whereas the third gear is to do with the way riddle transactions are split and combined .
Proof-of-Stake Improvements
When it comes to the PoW improvements, they want to reduce the dependence on the Linear PoS design. This is because of the concerns that surround the billboard of coins by the users american samoa well as the impingement on network security .
basically, users will connect to the network, stake their coins and then disconnect when the mint historic period has been destroyed. This march is then completed again and they will connect to the network once their coin age has been replenished .
The Cloakcoin developers want to create a PoS algorithm whereby those who stake their coins are rewarded on a more regular and consistent basis. This would therefore encourage more regular stake and have no negative impact on the security .
Hence, the Cloakcoin developers want to remove the addiction on the Coin Age component in the stake algorithm. They besides want to try and structure an incentive mechanism with a “ speed component ” that would reward those users who have been staking for longer periods of clock time without disconnecting .
Combining & Splitting of Transactions
As mentioned, the current Enigma protocol will allow for one single cloak transaction. The developers say that they are presently busy working on an update that would allow multiple transactions to be combined into a individual “ super transaction ” .
This transaction will then contain multiple dissemble transactions which would have the involve of obfuscating any one particular transaction through safety in numbers. The developers want to give the exploiter the ability to choose the number of co-operative transactions that will be required for the transaction .
You can think of it arsenic analogues as the “ Mixin level ” that is applied on the Monero network when it comes to the number of decoy outputs .
ultimately, the developers besides want to provide users with the ability to cloak a big number of CLOAK as a series of smaller transactions. You can think of this as order batch of the Enigma and CloakCoin transactions. The developers would like to make this compatible with compound Enigma transactions .
Cognosec Security Audit
The security audit carried out by Cognosec found that security for the blockchain, network and wallet were quite full-bodied. The primary focus for redress was in the Enigma code, and several recommendations were made by Cognosec in their audit report. Since the security audit this past January 2018 changes have been made to improve the security of Cloakcoin even further .
stopping point
Cloakcoin has been one of the longer running cryptocurrencies in being, and despite some early claims of the undertaking being a victimize it has stood the test of time. It is arguably one of the most dependable privacy coins available, and is claimed to be better at providing anonymous transactions than more democratic privacy-centric coins .
The holocene security audit besides provides extra peace of judgment for users, since any security flaws have been uncovered by a third-party supplier. Since Cloakcoin has released their code as open-source in December 2017 anyone can examine the code to see if recommended security updates have been done .
Cloakcoin provides anonymity and privacy to its users, and provides an easy to use method for transacting with digital currencies. Because it is a PoS coin it besides provides its users with the ability to make 6 % per class plainly by staking, and an extra 1.8 % of transaction fees to help secure the Enigma network. This alone is a strong reason to use Cloakcoin as a prefer privacy coin.
While the price of CLOAK has dropped dramatically since its December 2017 high, the same can be said for every cryptocurrency, and if the recent lastingness of the coin relative to others is an indication CLOAK could be a strong performer in any market recovery .
Featured Image via Fotolia
disclaimer : These are the writer ’ south opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research .
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