You may have heard of AlphaBay, the darknets top marketplace. Whatever your personal thoughts and feelings are of the things that are bought and sold there, you cannot deny their presence is massive and the impact of such a service is huge. To boot, it's all fueled by cryptocurrency, which some people think is all totally untraceable (it's not).
Alphabay has currently integrated
three major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. None of which are truly private protocols, they just mask their transaction data. It seems fitting that AB would integrate a crypto that uses zk-SNARKS technology, for true end-end privacy, and that's just what they are doing come July 1st.
With the scaling issues Bitcoin faces, people have high incentive to not use the BTC protocol and save themselves $3 a transaction. That's a latte after all! Also due to the nature of some goods traded on AlphaBay, zero-knowledge transactions will be welcomed with open arms.
Why do you care? Because you could make some excellent trading returns! As of the time of this writing, ZEC is trading around the $300 range. I think we could potentially see a 3:1 exchange rate soon after July 1st, meaning 3 ZEC for 1 BTC at a minimum. I wanted to put the awareness of this event out further into the community so more of us could potentially jump in on this opportunity if you did not know about it. Poloniex and other exchanges offer direct USD & BTC to ZEC trading if you are looking for an easy way to buy in.
As always, anything could happen, and this is just one person's opinion. Invest at your own risk.
Need more proof? https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/duplicates/6d7q81/alphabay_will_accept_zcash_starting_july_1st_2017/
Good Luck and may the Crypto be with us!