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Hi Zeeps!
Thanks to @decentralistdan for stepping in with the ECC update last week. I was out of the office Friday after traveling to Singapore for meetings, Token 2049, and the Network State.
This week was ECC Q4 planning week. Our objectives were to:
- Review our performance in Q2
- Reassess our priorities and contributions to the Zcash community
- Recommit to a roadmap we believe in
We’re cleaning up our refactored roadmap and will share it with you late next week.
This week we set the stage by reviewing our mission, legacy in motion, the importance of “confronting the brutal facts,” our “hedgehog concept,” and embracing a “culture of discipline.”
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A culture of discipline can be summarized as:
Disciplined people: Self-motivated, accountable, and willing to take ownership of their work.
Disciplined thought: A culture that embraces truth, encourages constructive debate, analyzes mistakes to learn, and leads with questions rather than assertions.
Disciplined action: A focus on executing plans and processes consistently, without excessive controls or bureaucracy.
These are things that we embrace at ECC. One thing that I love about our team is that we are often highly opinionated and not afraid to articulate our points of view, but we frequently challenge those views between ourselves, and the people here are quick to change them when they see flaws or better thinking. It’s a refreshing difference between what we often see in the world where opinions and perspectives seem to get entangled in identity, and are inflexible to change.
Embracing a culture of discipline allows us to confront the brutal facts, adjust, and better execute as a highly skilled team. This is often painful work, but it is part of our rhythm.
Janie led us through a team retrospective on Tuesday, and each of the functional leaders conducted self-assessments on Wednesday.
Here are a few highlights from the retrospective for the quarter:
Things that helped us move forward included the in-person, community, and focused planning time at the Z|ECC summit, strong internal team communication and collaboration, improvements in our infrastructure, progress on zcashd deprecation, NU6 execution, highly engaged partners such as Brave, Flexa, and Keystone, and taking a little time to breath.
Things that held us back included the amount of time spent on ZIP 320, some partners’ lack of readiness, development process issues and bottlenecks, trying to juggle too many things at once, and a lack of cohesion with our marketing and comms.
From these, we discussed things we can do differently, including more automation, tightening up some processes, hiring an additional core engineer, focusing ruthlessly on what will drive adoption and privacy, and more cohesive and aggressive marketing.
The self-assessments focused on strategy, operations, Zcash R&D & engineering, Zashi, product marketing, communications, and community. In each of these sessions, the functional owners provided an overview of what we are doing well and, confronting the brutal facts, where we are falling short and need to reconsider our approach and plans.
This information was used to feed into a refactored roadmap and is helping us adjust plans and focus on the things that will allow ECC to deliver digital cash through a privacy protocol (Zcash) and products (Zashi) that are secure and privacy-protecting, sync quickly, scale linearly, support instant payments, and deliver a low-friction and enjoyable experience for onboarding, storing, spending, and swapping with ZEC.
We are super bullish on the future of Zcash, and it’s our great honor to contribute through the abilities of our world-class team, clear vision, culture of discipline, and commitment to execution.
Our next planning week will be our next Z|ECC Summit, which we’ll be holding with some of you in January! Stay tuned for details in the coming weeks.
Where else we focused this week:
Zashi
On Monday we dropped a new video teaser on Zashi + Coinbase.
Design
- Finalized Request ZEC flow (Payer flow)
- Working on Transaction History Redesign
- Working on Transaction Success/Error screen
- Updating designs based on Product and Development feedback
- Preparing dark mode for finalized flows
- Working on new screenshots for AppStore/PlayStore
iOS
Unique Installs: 3.44k
Total Downloads: 4.05k
Rating: 4.9 ★
- Built the whole Request ZEC flow
- Built the logic for Address Book storage (local + remote)
- Updated the Receive screen UI
- Shipped 10 dev builds for team testing
- Tested and reported feedback for the Flexa 1.0.3 release
- Updated all buttons and screen padding across the app
- Testing and preparing 1.2.1 release for next week
Android
Total Install Base: 2.09k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 7.15k
Rating: 4.690 ★
- Merged a PR with ZIP 321
- Updated Send screen UI
- Working on Address Book feature and all related UI/UX updates - PR by the end of the week
- Working on the new Receive screen and QR code screen
Zcash Core
@ebfull announced his departure from ECC as an employee to better focus his time on Zcash scalability research. The ECC team will actively collaborate with him to bring performance and scalability to Zcash.
Check this out - a Zcash Kubernetes deployment solution from @yasserisa! So good.
Zcash updates:
- zcashd 6.0.0 release
- zcash Rust crate releases that include updates necessary for the zcashd 6.0 release and improvements and bug fixes in support of the mobile wallets.
- incrementalmerkletree 0.7
- shardtree 0.5
- zcash_protocol 0.4
- zcash_address 0.6
- zip321 0.2
- zcash_primitives 0.19
- zcash_proofs 0.19
- zcash_keys 0.4
- zcash_client_backend 0.14
- zcash_client_sqlite 0.12
Catch updates from the team directly in this week’s Arborist call. Here are a couple of excerpts covering Zashi and Testnet recovery.
Other
We released the Q1 2024 Transparency Report
@peacemonger is running a community content contest! $500 worth of ZEC? Yes please.
That’s all of this week!
Continuing to execute with discipline.
Onward.
