Pursuing her interests in blockchains, Jane Lippencott, fourth-year international business and finance major, co-founded ZenCash with finance Ph.D. candidate Robert Viglione in May 2017.
ZenCash is an evolution of Zcash Technology, creating a messaging, media and transaction platform that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It’s this privacy and anonymity that makes blockchain technology so attractive and makes cryptocurrency possible.
After recently undergoing a huge surge in value, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin has become a hot topic in the economic world and, rising in popularity with it, is blockchain technology.
Cryptocurrency is a form of digital money designed to be independent of a centralized banking system. Existing entirely online makes blockchains a place where wealth can be stored and then subsequently accessed from anywhere in the world. Considering their recent growth, will systems such as ZenCash be able to entrench themselves into the market?
“I think the biggest hold up right now actually lies outside of the industry,” Lippencott says. “The onboarding process to buying crypto and then figuring out how you can spend it, figuring out how to hold it securely is just ridiculously time consuming.”
Getting into cryptocurrency can be a scary prospect, especially if you’re a college student shopping in the Ramen aisle thinking about the cost of textbooks. That in mind, Lippencott believes joining the Carolina Crypto Club is a way to get your feet wet without actually making an investment.
“It’s built to be a really open space to discuss and debate about all the nuances of the blockchain space and different ways to view and value cryptocurrencies,” says Lippencott.
Campus experts such as Lippencott and Colin Jones, an assistant professor of finance at the Darla Moore School of Business, advocate the benefits of cryptocurrency while discouraging the idea of coins as a quick profit.
Jones says that one way of using cryptocurrency is as another path to a diverse financial portfolio separate from the global economy. The true benefits of blockchains, then, may not be clear to the average American. For those that live in a more volatile country, Jones says the use of cryptocurrencies is more immediate.
“Imagine living in Venezuela, where right now they’re bartering with eggs as their currency because the government is so indebted they’ve had to hyper inflate the currency,” Jones said. “All of the citizens who’ve been working their whole lives, just diligent people, have built up a small nest egg, maybe a bit of savings, and then overnight it just goes to nothing.”
Although there are benefits that the everyday American can get from blockchain technology, it is these people that pioneers such as Lippencott create their platforms for.
“We have team members in over 20 countries now and a large number of our users are actually from Venezuela and other countries where the currency and/or government is pretty unstable,” Lippencott says. “Where people need to worry about having security over their assets so that they can feed their families, we are certainly seeing a pretty, pretty broad usage of ZenCash.”
As Bitcoin has grown, so has blockchain technology. It’s moving beyond protecting just financial assets to being used by major companies to protect personal information as well. In a world where cyber-attacks are becoming more common, many believe people need a better way to safeguard their information, and blockchains are a way to do that.
Jones described that what makes blockchain so secure is that it functions as a "distributed ledger" — to hack it, he says, one has to hack thousands of computers simultaneously.
“Very reputable businesses are investing heavily, your IBM’s, in blockchain technology and helping businesses become more efficient and more productive using this new technology, which is the same technology that underlies Bitcoin,” Jones said. “That was the first application of it but it’s now revolutionizing all walks of life and we’ll be using it in our daily lives and not even know it.”