Why is it 4x the cost of the one that got rejected 2 months ago?
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Pros:
- Many users have been asking for Full support of Zcash on Ledger
- Development from Ledger itself ensures that it will pass their own requirements
- Retroactive grant limits our risk exposure
Cons:
- Not much technical details given regarding the implementation. Is it based on librustzcash? How big will the resulting app be? Will it be on the main store or relegated to dev? Is the development restarting from scratch or is it reusing prior work (Zondax or mine)? Is it going to be reviewed by Zcash protocol experts? Is it going to be compatible with Zip-32? etc.
- The company does not have a good track record of delivering quality and ontime apps for Zcash. How is it going to be different this time? To be honest, I think they need to build some trust first.
- The price is high.
IMO, if the grant is approved it is paramount that its payment is retroactive and subject to clear quality of deliverables. Technically, the previous grant worked, but it used a custom version of ZecWallet that is obsolete and only supported Sapling. I suspect it wasn’t used by many (or even any).
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Hello @dismad ,
We indeed plan to focus on zaino as it will most likely support all lightwalletd functionalities.
Yes it does. Each application update will undergo a security audit from a trusted third party lab. I can’t really disclose the cost, and the time required for the audit depends on the size of the update but they usually take 1 or 2 weeks.
It will depend on the concrete impacts for both Ledger Live integration and the device app, but we’ll closely monitor upcoming network upgrades to anticipate changes early and minimize any delays.
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Hello @hanh ,
To answer some of your questions:
We don’t expect app size to be a blocker, mainly because the Nano S is no longer a constraint.
The app will be released in My Ledger as a standard app, not under developer mode as we plan to provide a great user experience with Ledger Live and the app.
The app is being rewritten to meet current Ledger SDK standards, but we plan to reuse learnings from Zondax’s earlier app and your prior work.
Compatibility with ZIP-32 is part of the plan, and we’re keen to collaborate with Zcash protocol experts throughout the specification and development phases. We are already in contact with ECC, notably around PCZT, to coordinate on interoperability and transaction construction workflows for upcoming protocol requirements.
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a. On the market, Zcash is the only public blockchain with zero-knowledge proofs. Even though Ledger ignored it for years, Zcash has survived and its value continues to grow.
b. There are many hardware wallets on the market, and new ones will keep coming. Wallets are consumables compared to blockchains — they are highly replaceable and mostly compatible (product A, B, C, D, etc.).
This asking price makes no sense. If $100,000 is acceptable, then do it; or, just forget it.
In the future, wallet X, Y, Z, Regdel… and more hardware wallets will support Zcash UA/orchard anyway.
While they haven’t replied to you directly, I wouldn’t give too much hope into them maintaining it without further funding:
If I’m understanding this correctly, unless funded, they’re deprecating ZEC altogether. If they’re not supporting T-addresses for free, they’re not going to do it with Shielded/UA either. So we can expect that $100k maintenance fee to be a minimum yearly payment (+ extra, I’m assuming ZSA support is going to be another hefty grant).
Ultimately, “we” (ZCG) need to decide whether access to another provider of shielded cold storage is worth the (re-occurring) cost.
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Hello Zcash fam, my name is Ariel, and I am the Partnerships Manager for Ledger in Brazil. I met @michae2xl a few months ago, and since then, he has been showing me what Ledger has been doing globally with Zcash.
In one of our conversations, we thought about designing a campaign for co-branded Ledgers with Zcash. Ledger does a few collabs, and we recently launched the Ledger Flex Solana in partnership with some communities from that ecosystem, with very interesting incentives for holders. In this link, you can check out other collabs: Ledger collaborations | Ledger
Initially, since we are located in Brazil, we talked about something more local, but if this is of interest to you, we can expand this project to a global level.
To produce these custom Ledgers, there is a cost that varies according to the model and quantity.
The positive point is that the amount paid would be a resale price, and the profit from the sales would go to Zcash.
To do a campaign similar to the Flex Solana one, which besides the device also has a custom case and box, is available for purchase on the website, and has posts on Ledger’s official pages, we would need a minimum of 500 units.
It is now possible to do smaller tests in simpler formats starting from 100 units of Nanos or 50 units of the touch devices.
This week I will meet with @michae2xl to present more details about the operational costs, potential earnings, and activations that can be done.
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With the release of zashi, the zcash community tends to have some opinionated stances on default privacy. This flagship wallet requires any spends to be shielded. I am a fan of this feature, and it seems to be popular in the community as well. Would Ledger Live share this preference for shielded spends? Even if not, at least a pop-up to notify the user that they are spending transparent funds on any spend they are making to ensure no accidental mishaps occur. Open to other ideas as well, but I haven’t seen anyone speak to this yet.
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