Although privacy coins implement and utilize different features and technologies to attract user, each coin is still a virtual currency by design that holds value. Each privacy coin has its respective price on the listed exchanges and the prices fluctuate daily, exactly like the stock in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies are known to be quite volatile due to dynamic nature of the industry well as the as the occurrence of new news or certain events can cause a massive impact on the price of an asset.
Using historical data of the prices of the investigated privacy coins found on the website CoinMarketCap, a price volatility measure could be carried out by using the calculated variance of each privacy coin.
| Privacy Coin | Mean Price | Variance | Standard Deviation |
|---|---|---|---|
Monero | 250.93 | 4879.86 | 69.86 |
Zcash | 157.53 | 2085.53 | 45.67 |
Dash | 173.42 | 3850.83 | 62.06 |
Beam | 0.63 | 0.08 | 0.28 |
PIVX | 0.71 | 0.18 | 0.42 |
Standard Deviation as a Percentage of Mean Price
Within the data, it is clearly obvious that the smaller and less-established coins Beam and PIVX are significantly more volatile than the rest. Monero and Zcash have a smaller relative volatility with the percentages just under 30%, but this is an extremely high value in comparison to the average volatility of the S&P 500 Index. Despite a few outliers, most periods of the S&P 500 Index fall between 10-20%.