ZCash Company CEO Zooko Wilcox has weighed in on the two recently launched Mimblewimble blockchain implementations, Grin and Beam, and considers them unequal to ZCash (ZEC). ZCash, based originally on Bitcoin’s code, is a blockchain implementation using the so-called “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge” protocol, or zk-SNARK.

Wilcox, speaking to TheBlockCrypto, called the new chains “fragile and limited on a technological basis,” adding “I do not view their underlying technology as being robust.”

The article also highlighted a tweet Wilcox posted last year, in which he asked “To whom is the user’s private data revealed? Is it revealed to the miners? I don’t understand this part.”

Unlike Grin which is unequivocally a privacy coin – its privacy functions cannot be turned off – Wilcox said of ZCash that “I don’t see ZCash as a privacy coin […] It’s general purpose internet money.” Beam perhaps ers toward ZCash here, with an optional function to display proofs of transactions to “accountants, auditors, and even tax authorities,” according to a Beam blog post.

The same post described ZCash as being very private, but at the cost of being computationally heavy and having poor scalability. It also alludes to the precarious “ZCash Parameter Generation Ceremony” wherein a critical set of reference “parameters” that power the entire blockchain must be created by trusted developers, and trusted to be destroyed.

ZCash also employs a steep founders’ reward – 20% of of the reward for each block mined – which has been sharply criticized in the past.

The privacy coin was listed on Coinbase Pro late last year.

Both Grin and Beam have seen massive price boom-and-busts in the past week, both climbing hundreds of percents from their initial trading zones. Grin has had a notably strong launch with a very high amount of mining support – according to one investor, it was “maybe the most expensive genesis block one in history.”

(Featured image from Z.cash)