John McAfee's GHOST Privacy Coin: The May 2020 Launch and What Happened Next

Update 25 September 2026: This report from 16 May 2020 covers the planned launch of GHOST. The coin went live, peaked at USD 2.11 on 8 June 2020 and has since lost practically all of its value; CoinGecko lists no active trading pairs anymore. John McAfee died in June 2021. The section "What happened to Ghost coin?" below sums up the story.

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The privacy focused Ghost coin, backed by crypto personality and security researcher John McAfee, was set to go live on 25 May 2020. The consensus algorithm is Proof of Stake (PoS), and the project supports masternodes. It was designed to use zero knowledge proofs and an escrow pool to shield the history of transactions. At launch, 25% of the supply was to be distributed to holders of the ESH token, with the rest generated by staking and running masternodes.

McAfee announced the details on Twitter on 16 May 2020. "The whitepaper for GHOST is live! To claim your GHOST at launch, you must hold $ESH token on May 25th during the snap shot," he wrote in his post announcing the whitepaper. That snapshot is long over, and the claim offer no longer applies.

Ghost Coin Mission And Technology

The whitepaper noted that privacy is an important right and that it is vital to preserve it. It defined the mission as to “provide users entirely private, secure, affordable and reliable means to transact over the network”. Ghost coin was pitched as a combination of the best features of different crypto assets: the distributed ledger technology from Bitcoin, InstantSend and masternodes from Dash, custom zk-SNARKs from Zcash and a general staking function. It also featured a dynamically calibrated coin supply that was supposed to burn transaction fees and adjust supply in response to economic pressure. How staking works in general is explained in our guide How to Stake Crypto.

Ghost Coin Specifications at Launch

Block Size: 2 MB

Block Time: 60 seconds (re-targeting every block)

Coin Emission Rate: 6 GHOST maximum per block

Maximum Coin Supply: 13,573,415 GHOST (May 25, 2020) / 15,087,292 GHOST (June, 2020) / 30,226,069 GHOST (June, 2040)

Total Coin Supply: 55,000,000 GHOST (elastic supply, controlled by burning of transaction fees)

Minimum GHOST Required To Run Masternode: 20,000 GHOST

Accumulator Modulus: RSA-2048

What happened to Ghost coin?

The launch went ahead, and GHOST reached its all-time high of USD 2.11 on 8 June 2020, according to CoinGecko. The momentum did not last. On 20 August 2020, McAfee announced on Twitter that he was abandoning the project because, in his words, management was incapable of making it a success. He returned in October 2020 and said his dispute with the team had ended.

In October 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged McAfee in a civil case with touting other ICOs without disclosing that he was paid for it; the case did not concern GHOST, as the SEC press release shows. McAfee died in a prison near Barcelona in June 2021. Without its public face, the project faded. CoinGecko data last updated in July 2026 shows a market capitalisation of only a few dollars and no active trading pairs.

The idea behind GHOST lives on in the established privacy coins. Monero and Zcash remain the reference projects, and their outlook is tracked on our Monero price prediction and Zcash price prediction pages. Regulation has tightened as well: under the EU anti-money-laundering rules, crypto service providers may no longer handle anonymity-enhancing coins from July 2027, as explained in Buy Zcash Despite EU Ban.

The lesson from GHOST is a familiar one: a famous backer can carry a launch, but not a network. Without active development, exchange listings and liquidity, even a technically ambitious privacy coin disappears.