38,000 new ZEC holders on Solana in six weeks. Now what?

[bentertainer]

Hi all. I’m Ben, CMO at Raydium, a Solana DEX. Disclosure first: I’m not involved in the token mentioned below and I’m not here to promote it. Part of its trading runs through Raydium pools and we earn fees on those trades, so I’m not neutral either. I’m posting because ZEC distribution on Solana has changed a lot in six weeks, and the interesting question is what happens to those holders next.

What happened

Since early September a Solana memecoin has been paying its holders in ZEC. Every trade takes 3% and pays it out to holders in ZEC through the day. Nobody in Zcash designed this as far as I know. A launchpad on Solana lets a token pick any asset as its trading pair, and this one picked ZEC. I’m deliberately not linking the token. The dashboard below names it because the data is public.

The numbers, onchain, as of 20 Sep

• 84,000 wallets have received ZEC from it: about 8,700 ZEC, roughly $10M at the time of payout.
• 38,000 of those wallets had never held ZEC on Solana before. That is the conservative count.
• More than a quarter of ZEC’s volume on Solana now runs through pairs like this. On 22 Sep Messari data noted Solana was the third largest venue for spot ZEC that day.

Dashboard: ZEC Rewards via ZCAT | Dune

The caveats

• This is ZEC bridged to Solana via NEAR, the same asset Raydium listed last October. It is a Solana token backed by ZEC, not ZEC on your chain. I’m new to Zcash, so I’ll defer to you on what that means for privacy.
• About half of the ZEC paid out is still sitting in wallets that had never held ZEC six weeks ago.
• It’s a memecoin. It’s not a privacy product and I won’t pretend otherwise. What it has done is put ZEC in a lot of new hands.

Now what

38,000 wallets received ZEC without ever deciding to buy ZEC. They hold it and they see the name every day, and right now nothing on the Zcash side is catching them. If you could put one thing in front of them, what would it be? A wallet, a guide etc? Through our owned channels we can reach some of these holders, and I’d rather point them somewhere this community stands behind than guess.

If anyone wants the data, the queries are public on Dune and happy to also share the SQL.

[Lowo88]

Hello @bentertainer,

Best place to start is on ZECHUB all the info they would need to get started id there. I’m the founder of Nozy Wallet if they need a good privacy wallet Nozy, but they would need to start a Zebrad node up. For max privacy on the ZecHub page its a pick a wallet they can pick from any of those they like.

Welcome to Zcash my PFP is apart of an SOL meme project called PBJ.

[zooko]

Hi, @bentertainer ! Thanks for telling us about this and offering to show the new ZEC holders something. I would second @Lowo88’s suggestion of ZecHub (https://zechub.wiki/). It’s got comprehensive information, it has stood the test of time, it’s newbie-friendly, and just friendly, and it’s operated by a DAO that is independent of any company or foundation.

[Shawn]

I would recommend those users that have stacked some paper ZEC (no offense) that want to Hodl for some time move their ZEC to native and get a wallet that will allow them to shield their funds. They will be amazed at how easy it is to use Zcash and stay private. Holding ZEC in a shielded pool for awhile is the best way to help ensure maximum privacy.

Several wallets like ZODL, ZKool, Nozy, Cake, Zingo feature auto-shielding, swaps to other coins via Near and even the ability to buy stuff with Zcash at major retailers like Chipotle and GameStop (via Flexa).

Not that holding a ZEC pegged token is a bad thing , it’s just not taking advantage of the biggest feature of Zcash: Privacy.

[strahncryptography]

We are soon publishing an atomic swap primitive with shielded Zcash (no adaptor signatures, purely noninteractive) that would allow smart contracts to natively transact with shielded Zcash, such as allowing anyone to fulfill a (wrapped) ZEC to native ZEC order trustlessly, or accepting native ZEC to a treasury and trustlessly minting wrapped ZEC without validators (take that Red Bridge). It is for Ethereum only but we hope that we can port it on Solana too someday lol

(Announcement coming very soon, we have been diligently working on it for several weeks now)

[bentertainer]

Thanks all, this is exactly what I was hoping for. Awesome to see such helpful messages. ZecHub it is.

Reading the replies together, the page for these new holders practically writes itself: Shawn’s pitch (you already have paper ZEC, now go get the part that makes it Zcash), the wallet list, and ZecHub’s pick-a-wallet page.

If something like this lands on ZecHub, from the people who’ve been doing this for years, I can amplify and get this in front of the growing number of holders. Happy to share any data behind the numbers with whoever wants to take the lead on this. Coming from this community it’ll be trusted; coming from a Solana DEX it wouldn’t be, and probably shouldn’t be.

@strahncryptography the wrapped-to-native atomic swap is the piece I didn’t know existed. Even Ethereum-first, it’s the real answer to the “none of it is shielded” caveat. Please update here when that gets announced

on my side, I can then share the numbers updated here, including how many of the 38,000+ move.

[strahncryptography]

Sure, will do! If Raydium will be interested in potentially launching the Solana alternative, we’ll- actually, I think Zcash Foundation will be more interested in that if it ever comes to it, but I will notify you haha. Here or email? Mine is avi@strahn.xyz

[Michae2xl]

Hi! One approach is to connect users with their local communities and show them their options. We have various languages ​​and channels. Below is a potential data hierarchy for the introduction; we also have Superteams as partners we can collaborate with.

• Global Communities · OpenZcash
• Zcash Wallets · OpenZcash
• Ecosystem · OpenZcash
• ZEC Observatory · OpenZcash

[common1]

How many of these wallets bridged their zec? how many have been selling down their accumulated zec?

[bentertainer]

hey @common1, i just ran the onchain numbers (Dune, as of Sep 24)

• 86k unique wallets have received ZEC from trading tokens paired with ZEC (since early September when pairing was enabled). ~9,400 ZEC (~$11M) in total paid out.
• 39k of those wallets had never held ZEC on Solana before.
• of those 39k first-time holders, 62% still hold ZEC today majority of which have never sold or moved a single ZEC. as a group they now hold more than half the ZEC they received, so it seems some are buying more
• across all 86k wallets: 53% still hold ZEC.
• bridging: basically none. burns from these wallets total 78 ZEC, and the outbound transfers go to DEX pools and a few large wallets, not to a bridge. the ZEC that stays, stays on Solana

Seems based on the above, a guide on ZecHub could be helpful to point this community to. I’ve set up a team on the platform in order to post a bounty for this, but still awaiting verification for it. It seems 3 admins need to first sign off. hopefully it comes in soon. I’ll keep you guys updated here!

[bentertainer]

Quick update on the guide. Encouraged by Zooko, I posted a bounty on ZecHub board for it to be written and it’s going through the approval process. Will link it here once its finally gone through.

By the way, I did the swap myself via Near to a Zcash wallet to fund the bounty wallet. Feels kinda cool holding shielded ZEC for the first time. Gud tek.

Will keep you guys posted!

[bentertainer]

Good eye @ManyRios . That one was me posting it from my personal account by mistake. The board wants it under a team, so Squirrel removed it and I’m re-posting it under the Raydium team page with the treasury attached. One snag though: the deleted one still counts against my 1 bounty a week limit, so the server is blocking the re-post for now. Working on it. Same scope, same 0.5 ZEC. I’ll share link here once it’s up!

[bentertainer]

Bounty is up on ZecHub, under the Raydium team: ZEC Bounties | Bounty Platform (GitHub login to view).Thanks again to everyone here and big shoutout to Squirrel at ZecHub for the help in getting this up!

[vaspholdings]

ZCAT?! Is this yet another feline crypto conspiracy?
Why is there always a cat around just before crypto gets weird?

Clarissa the Bengal had Razzlekhan.
Toshi has Brian Armstrong.
Oatmeal has Popcat.
Joycat has MOG.
Simon’s Cat has an entire token economy.

At what point do we just have to accept the uncomfortable truth… that the humans may merely be ‘liquidity providers’ for the cats.

DISCLAIMER: As a cat owner with a cat who’s psychopathy score is 49% overall*, I really don’t recommend buying any of these memecoins. Don’t feed the ‘global feline liquidity network’!

[vaspholdings]

*disturbingly this apparently means she is just a normal cat.

[vaspholdings]

@igorsilent

Taking Zooko’s and Lowo88’s advice

Igor, don’t try this brazen piece of opportunistic framing.

No. They were not inviting Sapling.cash.

Zooko and Lowo88 were responding to Ben, in Ben’s thread, about an already-existing group of Solana wallets that had received ZEC through an unrelated token. Their recommendation of ZecHub was directed at that situation.

You just arrived afterwards with your own Solana memecoin launchpad and appropriated that advice as though Sapling.cash had somehow been included in the invitation.

It wasn’t.
Neither Zooko nor Lowo88 invited Sapling.cash.

I object to you presenting your unilateral decision as “taking Zooko’s and Lowo88’s advice”, because that wording borrows credibility from people who were not talking to you and were not endorsing your project.

Sapling.cash looks like a very new speculative Solana project attaching itself opportunistically to Zcash at multiple points at once:

bridged ZEC in the mechanics, the name “Sapling”, Zcash mainnet “stamps”, and now ZecHub in the onboarding path.

You do not get to assemble those pieces around your project and then allow the resulting association to stand in for actual community trust.

If Sapling.cash wants credibility in the Zcash ecosystem, earn it.

Publish the production code. Identify who controls the privileged keys. Publish the independent audit. Document the reserve and recovery mechanics. Explain precisely what users actually own. Explain the trust assumptions. Explain why this is meaningfully Zcash adoption rather than a Solana memecoin platform using ZEC as part of its token economics.

Until then, I do not think the Zcash community should be helping legitimise, promote, or normalise Sapling.cash.

Permissionless means you can build it.

It does not mean you are invited, endorsed, vetted, or welcomed just because your wording creates that implication.

[kali-gogolo]

PR for the bounty is up: #2245 (system blocked me from adding the direct link). I tested it with real ZEC from Phantom. The u1 withdrawal landed shielded in Ironwood in about 8 minutes, for 0.00025 ZEC plus about 0.0016 SOL. Two things new holders will hit are in the page: solswap’s Withdraw button can sit dead (the ZEC is safe and near./com withdraws it), and the explorer summary doesn’t show Ironwood yet.

[Shawn]

MOD Note: some comments regarding a Solana NFT/memecoin/ZSA20 were removed.

Soft spamming and advertising for these kinds of projects are not welcome on the forums and users doing so will be banned.

[strahncryptography]

We’ll be launching Skyhook’s bridge UI for testing tomorrow (tomorrow as in end of Monday wherever your time appears to be)! And trust me, that one’s fully transparent (in fact, it is so modular that you can add the code to your own contract and it’ll still work, albeit you’ll have to setup your own oracle or require everyone to submit their own proofs)

We’ll also support setting up risk free yield pools for literally anyone who owns some wrapped ZEC (it’s not risk free if you hold ETH because then there’s impermanent loss and all), as well as liquidity servers if you hold ZEC. Further, we are adding support for institutional LPs such as Maya Protocol to setup up swap pairs programmatically!

[bentertainer]

Here’s the PR @kali-gogolo couldn’t link: Add guide: move ZEC on Solana to shielded Zcash by kali-gogolo · Pull Request #2245 · ZecHub/zechub · GitHub . Tested end to end with real ZEC, screenshots and txids in the page, about 8 minutes and under a cent in ZEC fees, which matches my own run from a few days ago.