What Is X-Cash (XCASH)?

The X-Cash Foundation is an open-source, ICO-free (initial coin offering) blockchain project that aims to develop a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that brings innovations to the privacy coin space.

According to the whitepaper, the primary features of X-Cash are:

• FlexPrivacy - Private and public transactions are on the same blockchain. Private and X-Cash's FlexPrivacy lets users decide whether they want the transaction to be public or not.

• Delegated-Proof-of-Private-Stake (DPOPS) - X-Cash custom consensus is designed for privacy coins. The X-Cash consensus model moves away from the decentralized but unsustainable PoW consensus and proposes its own DPoS variant with the DBFT consensus. Delegated proof of stake (DPoS) is an evolution of the PoS concept whereby network users vote and choose delegates to validate the next block.

• Sidechains- X-Cash makes it easy to create and host the blockchain while being able to profit from X-Cash's unique features.

  XCASH is the native cryptocurrency for governance, creation of sidechains, and smart contracts that power various products and services of the X-Cash blockchain.

Since X-CASH is based on CryptoNight (CN) technology and has a privacy coin at its core, it has also chosen to retain RingCT for public and private transactions. This allows people to send public transactions while still retaining RingCT's core functionality, the "mixing" of inputs, without compromising the privacy of private transactions.

Further, users can use the X-Cash Daemon (xcashd) to create nodes, synchronize blockchains, and relay transactions. The xcashd is completely decoupled from the user's wallet. It does not have access to private keys and therefore does not know the transactions and balances. This means that a user can run xcashd on a separate computer or cloud and access it remotely to retrieve/provide the data needed for wallet operations.

Users can connect to remote xcashd instances provided by semi-trusted third parties. Because all transactions are signed locally, such third parties cannot steal their funds. However, privacy and reliability are compromised when using remote, untrusted nodes. For any real business, users are advised to run their full nodes. The team set up multiple public remote nodes in different locations to provide better reliability and trust.

In practice, the X-Cash blockchain allows public transactions to be viewed on a blockchain browser instead of other coin addresses. When the user's public address is provided, any publicly sent and linked transactions to the public key can be viewed in the explorer.

History of X-Cash (XCASH)

Zach Hildreth is the CTO of the X-Cash platform.