I’ve been seeing a lot of statistics shared this week on Zcash. At ECC, we don’t focus much on price. It affects us, sure, but our aim has always been adoption. But these two are mutually reinforcing. ZEC price appreciation comes with adoption, and adoption builds as people notice the price. But while ZEC didn’t reach an all-time high in price this week, we witnessed meaningful signs of adoption.
Let’s take a trip through a few of the numbers.
As I write this, the amount of ZEC in the shielded pool has reached 4.395M ZEC, or roughly 27% of all ZEC in existence. The start of this exponential growth to an all-time high coincided with our launch of the Zashi wallet: the “Zashi effect.”
In August, we began to see localized highs in aggregate transaction volume. The blue line below represents transactions where ZEC was either shielded or unshielded as Zcashers moved coins in or out of the shielded pool. The increase aligns with the ability to swap directly on both NEAR and Maya, as well as seamlessly using NEAR Intents to swap and cross-chain pay within Zashi itself.
Within Zashi, over $40M (based on a ZEC price of $265) has been swapped, with swaps to ZEC providing the highest daily volume.
Keep in mind that we only enabled this feature within Zashi in late August, coinciding with the increase in transaction volume. Once again, the Zashi effect is demonstrating that there is a demand for private storage and swap capability with a good user experience.
The following is a breakdown of the top token volume swapped to ZEC through Zashi since launch.
The pattern for me is clear. There is a clear demand for privacy, with people encrypting their wealth with shielded ZEC. And I believe this to be true:
ECC conducted quarterly planning late this week, and we’ll soon release an updated near-term roadmap. Our focus for Zashi this quarter is to polish up a few rough edges, improve the capabilities already implemented (like adding ephemeral addresses for swap change), and add support for Maya.
While Zcash has been improved and battle-tested for years, we are at the beginning of something entirely new. Hold on!
Here’s our journey this week:
Zashi
What we did:
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Zashi 2.4.1 and Zashi 2.4.2 bug fix app updates have been released to production on both platforms!
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Zashi 2.4.3 is coming to production with more bug fixes.
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User support, and began looking at better long-term options to improve the experience.
What’s up next:
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Implement ephemeral transparent addresses for all NEAR Intents supported functionalities.
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Focus on debugging user issues, fixing bugs, and making improvements.
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Continue reviewing & finalizing open designs, and progressing with new ones - Transparent Address Rotation, support for Ledger Hardware Wallet, Duress/Decoy Wallet feature, Multi-Account Support, and Reset Zashi revamp + Keystone fixes.
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Started working on Zashi Knowledge Base.
iOS Analytics
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Unique Installs: 14.6k (+2.5k from prior week)
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Total Downloads: 17.1k (+2.7k)
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AppStore Rating: 4.9* (unchanged)
Android Analytics
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Total Install Base: 5.67k (+840 from prior week)
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Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 25.5k (+1.3k)
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PlayStore Rating: 4.347* (+.016)
Zcash Core
What we did:
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NU6.1 final specifications finished.
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Met with Ledger engineers on shielded support.
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Ongoing Zallet development
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Zashi bug fixes/support.
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Work with Keystone on TEX address support.
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Supported NEAR teams’ work on shielded support.
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Updated seeder to NU 6.1 mainnet (zcash-seeder#21).
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Pulled in upstream changes to seeder (zcash-seeder#22).
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Updated the data sources for USD/ZEC exchange rates (librustzcash#1988).
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Added hashed-password JSON-RPC authorization to Zallet (wallet#299).
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Various PR reviews.
What’s up next:
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Implement account deletion for zcash_client_sqlite.
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Implementation of ephemeral transparent addresses for Zashi swaps and payments.
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Continued work on Zallet Beta and zcashd deprecation
Other:
Arjun’s interview with Zcash core engineers Sean Bowe and Str4d.
ECC conducted quarterly planning, and our updated roadmap will be published soon.
Met with DCG for project updates.
Met with Moon on potential Zcash support.
Next week will be busy in DC with Paul giving the keynote at the DC Fintech Summit, a DC Privacy Summit Roundtable & Dinner, the DC Privacy Summit, and participation in the Future of Money event at the Milken Institute.
If you didn’t already know, the life of every ZEC begins shielded by default.
That’s all for this week!
Upward and,
Onward.