Hello everyone!
First off, we at Zingolabs want to emphasize that we’re glad that end users of Zecwallet have a functioning app! However, because the following is likely directly related to Aditya’s proposal, and because of the speed at which this topic is moving, we wanted to make a record of our thoughts as well as some facts at the present time.
We also plan to submit a grant proposal within the coming days, and we are now working on closely related code. We understand that, due to a policy of a week-long waiting period for public comment, Aditya’s review will not be granted funding until, minimally, the ZCG’s next meeting in two weeks time. By that time we hope to have both submitted our grant, and let at least the minimum of one week for public comment and discussion elapse so that the committee and the community at large can have informed discussion.
We were motivated to take on the project of using the abandoned Zecwallet suite to build new applications of the Zcash technology, even before @adityapk00’s May16 retirement announcement, in part because we’re users, and in part to update the codebase, which had not been updated since v1.7.7 in October aside from a license update.
The code that we wrote and merged before the NU5 activation created a functioning zecwallet-lite version which we announced here. What this means is that while zecwallet-lite users experienced a 7-day-loss-of-service, we had a published fix.
More, when release 1.7.13 of zecwallet-lite-cli occurred it was derived from our solution (see Aditya’s fork), two hours after our fix was mentioned. We’re aware that this might have been the expedient solution or was the “right thing to do” from the perspective of getting a working app in front of the users ASAP. That having been said, there was never any attempt to communicate with any of us on any channel, at any time, about this fix.
We won’t say why that fix was not made available to users for 7 days, or how these changes were adapted for their codebase, but we want to note that Aditya proposes to dedicate 10% of his time to this project.
After these events, @Zancas proposed to Aditya that he delegate app publication authority to us. Following this exchange we all agreed it sounded like Aditya was uninterested in collaborating with us, though he encouraged us to develop on our own forks.
We think this is far less than ideal, because we believe we have a clear interest and detailed strategy for maintaining, and profoundly improving on this platform to which he has been a core contributor. We feel the facts we have outlined here shows that there would very likely have been no outage if we had held the keys on May 30th.
We will be submitting a grant proposal, based on our work and the attributed work of others, and our preferred mode is collaboration.
We love open source, and it’s great that we can build on top of the substantial codebase that @adityapk00 built, which in turn was built on top of the codebase that @str4d built on top of the codebase that the ECC built… and we look forward to continuing this work.