John McAfee recently announced an upcoming launch of a new privacy coin called GHOST, unveiling the project’s new Twitter account and accompanying website.

McAfee states that the whitepaper and more details will be posted in one month on May 15th.

Verified Zero-Knowledge Proofs

The GHOST website reveals that the proof of stake privacy coin will help protect user’s privacy by making users “nothing but a ‘ghost’ when transacting online.”

According to the official website, GHOST transactions will utilize a state-of-the-art escrow pool and will be verified using zero-knowledge proofs. GHOST will utilize a proof-of-stake network and have faster transaction times and lower fees, among other benefits.

Transactions processed on-chain will settle in under 60 seconds and users will simply pay less than a penny for transaction fees. The company is currently looking for masternodes to help secure the GHOST network and earn a share of transaction fees.

In an attempt to bootstrap the network, the Ghost team has allowed the ability for users to claim GHOST tokens at launch for free by holding McAfee’s DEX token ESH. In taking a snapshot of how many ESH tokens users hold on May 25th, the team will distribute GHOST tokens in proportion to this amount.

25% of the GHOST supply will be allocated to ESH token holders. Switch tokens (ESH) represent a revenue share of 50% of ALL fees collected by Switch and the SwitchDex network, which includes McAfeeDex. Each month 50% of revenue is airdropped (in ether) to ESH holders and the token is currently traded on IDEX, McAfeeDex, and Mercatox.

Community Reception to GHOST

It comes as no surprise that John McAfee, always a trend-spotter, has come out with a privacy coin, especially after Litecoin’s announcement in December 2019 of the collaboration with BEAM of the MimbleWimble privacy and fungibility feature being developed with testnet targeted toward the end of summer 2020.

TRON had also announced in January 2020 that it would begin the “largest-ever privacy protocol MPC to set a new Guinness World Record,” using zk-SNARKS-based anonymity.

The biggest question among the community is whether there is a need for another privacy token or whether existing players have already filled a need in the market. Among comments on McAfee’s Twitter thread after McAfee’s big launch announcement was that the GHOST technology was reminiscent of the first automated privacy swap created by the NIX platform.

Others in the community questioned whether the technology would be much different than existing solutions such as Monero or ZCash. Members of the community who were also proponents of Decred asked McAfee where there was room for collaboration on such a privacy feature.