Alphabay to Support Yet Another Payment Method: Zcash

In March 2017, Alphabay developers revealed a framework for yet another cryptocurrency: Ethereum. One month later, on May 1, the marketplace allowed the withdrawal and deposit of Ethereum. And rewind to 2016, Alphabay developers made the same advancement with Monero. Back to modern day, Alphabay staff announced impending support of Zcash, much to the surprise of Reddit users.

The community showed their highest level of acceptance when Alphabay announced the adoption of Monero. At the time, Alphabay was only the second darknet drug market to implement Monero, and only by three days. The marketplace ahead of Alphabay in the currency adoption race, Oasis, now sits in the list of dead marketplaces, so the point is a moot one.

“With the current network status of the Bitcoin network, we believe that adding
other currencies is a must,” the announcement began. “A few months ago, we have been asked by several journalists whether we would implement Zcash or not. We decided to move forward and we will accept Zcash payments starting July 1st, 2017.”

Monero received high praise for the level of security it provided when compared to many other cryptocurrencies. However, a decent cross section of the community saw the adoption as nothing more that a cash grab. Not necessarily a bad thing; scaling still occurred to some degree. And it is truly easy cash for investors in the currency. In this case, Alphabay admins simply needed to use their earned resources to buy Monero and then encourage Monero usage, driving the value of Monero up.

Monero became the “the drug dealer’s cryptocurrency of choice” and picked up mainstream media attention with similar attributions. The price spiked and inevitably increased the value of the currency. The Ethereum announcement brought the “pump and dump” analogies and a considerable amount of agitation from from the /r/ethereum. The Ethereum community likened themselves to the next HTTP (ironically Zcash founders used this phrase in reference to Bitcoin.)

Alphabay prepared Zcash support rather quickly, “[a]s usual, vendors will need to edit their listings to add this currency if they wish to accept Zcash payments. This is done on a voluntary basis. The option to accept Zcash will be ready starting from tomorrow,” the PGP signed announcement explained. The previous currencies were not implemented for roughly a month following the announcement.

Their announcement explained why the time for Zcash adoption was arriving shortly:

“Since the price of Zcash had been soaring in the past weeks, we believe that this currency has good potential and rising price shows a growing interest from the investor community, especially since the price has been on the rise since the beginning of the year. Until a consensus is reached in regards to the Bitcoin network scaling, we encourage users to use additional currencies to make their purchases, to ensure that all transactions are processed in a timely manner.”

Of note: the entire structure of Zcash concerns many from a privacy level. The mere footer of the Zcash website raises questions about the future of “decentralized” cryptocurrency. “2017 ZEROCOIN ELECTRIC COIN COMPANY”