What tags are the pre-release versions?
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Iâve lost track of the final metrics for DoD (definition of done). Is the ECC out of emergency mode yet?
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Not out of emergency mode yet. Weâve said we wonât exit emergency mode until:
- weâve delivered the products and updates promised
- users can access and spend their ZEC
- weâre confident that wallets are not being impacted by frequent crashes or inconsistent behavior.
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Hi, folks! With the recent restructuring and team changes at ECC, I have personally taken over the management of engineering and product for our mobile SDKs and our Zashi wallet. (Itâs my dream job! 
)
Earlier this month, we announced the pre-release availability of the Spend before Sync (SbS) capability in our mobile SDKs and that this was delivered to third-party wallet developers for implementation and testing.
Since then, our internal testing and our partner wallet developers (special thanks to Adi, Matthew, and Mandeep of Nighthawk) have helped us identify several bugs/UX-issues that need to be fixed before releasing the SDKs publicly. (Our own testing on SBS was less thorough than I understood it to be at the time, and we are grateful to our partners. 
) These updates are in development, and we are currently expecting to release new versions of the SDKs â with full SBS capability â soon.
There are also ongoing issues with the Zcash mempool, apparently involving new/modified âsandblastingâ behavior. We are working with Nighthawk and the rest of the Light Client Working Group on that, and weâll update you as we go.
Iâve also been working with the developers and UX/UI designers for our own Zcash wallet â Zashi â and I am super excited about the progress being made. As you may know, the ECC team opened a Zashi closed beta program a few weeks back, and we have received a lot of good feedback from our initial cohort of beta testers.
Weâll provide another update on all of these projects soon, so keep an eye on this forum and ECCâs X (Twitter) channel!
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Were or are people on vacation during the crisis?
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This is good news for @zooko, and good news for Zcash. 
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Meet the new boss⌠same as the old bossâŚ
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Yeah, I donât know what and why @GGuy is actually celebrating⌠
(Thanks, GGuy!)
Folks, just to reiterate, our current priority at Electric Coin Co is exiting Emergency Mode. Our definition of success here is that users of our code (i.e. users of Nighthawk, Unstoppable, and Edge) have access to their ZEC and can reliably send and receive ZEC. More specifically, these are the criteria we are laser focused on:
We believe that this is the most important thing we can do right now to support our mission of supporting a global, open currency that protects the freedom, dignity, and consent of everyone all over the world.
The next step in our work is to deliver a thoroughly tested mobile SDK that implements Spend Before Sync, which will hopefully check off all four of these boxes. Stay tuned!
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Why not sponsor Ywallet and have the team contribute to that ongoing project instead of using dev cycles on a completely new wallet? Seems like it would allow for more resources to be spent on the p0 emergency/perf. issues.
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I could not agree more here. It is a complete waste of effort and money for ECC to be building their own wallet. It is fairly obvious at this point that multi-currency wallets are preferred to single-currency wallets. For mass adoption, consumers will choose well-known and proven track records for their funds.
Not to mention it is in direct competition with ecosystem partners who have more resources and are better suited to build this kind of product because it is their primary objective!
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Unless the ECC Wallet has some real secret sauce, makes no point indeed. To echo Josh, âThe project isnât well funded enough for all the duplicative efforts.â
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I disagree with your opinion. The Zcash community has specifically requested a wallet developed by ECC or ZF in recent months. The community has also criticized ECC for the lack of an âofficialâ wallet despite many years have passed. While community-developed wallets are certainly a positive aspect, users want to be sure that such wallets are not suddenly abandoned by their development team, as has happened in the past. Therefore, I believe that ECC is on the right track and that this should not discourage independent developers from creating better wallets.
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How thin can you spread an engineering team that has already been reduced from recent layoffs?
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I remember, I also wanted an official wallet but it was a long time ago and the landscape has changeg (layoffs, price, Hanh⌠).
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I think people are mixing up things. ECC already has a âwalletâ, and has had it for a while: the mobile SDK and underlying crates. This is what theyâre working on (improving the SDK), and this is what Nighthawk etc. use.
They may be also working on Zashi (a GUI wallet), but AFAIK that is not their main priority right now and is not part of exiting emergency mode.
You may not agree that Zashi is needed but I think the SDK is crucial. Developers canât easily use Ywallet code to develop their own applications. The SDK/crates should provide that. IMO to turn Ywallet into that would take much more effort.
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Nope, Iâm not mixing things up. I remember building the ECC wallet myself from their code a while ago.
It is great they provide an SDK that works with Zcash network, because they know the internals very well and are the crypto experts that you can trust.
Matter of fact, the ECC has delivered a lot of code to Zebra, and they probably deserves more credit than they currently get.
But is building a GUI in their core competencies ? And do we want it ? I donât think so.
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I interpret âofficial walletâ to mean a wallet thatâs promoted / available on the main website and whose engineering/security is backed by ECC and/or ZF. IMO, that doesnât mean it has to be entirely developed by ECC, they could alternatively put some of their engineering resources behind a community wallet. There are risks to doing that, however, such as relying on whichever wallet they choose to continue to be funded through ZCG, and not being in control of all design decisions and the release process.
IMO, an efficient use of resources would be for ECC to focus on developer tooling, libraries, and docs, to make it easier for community developers to build more Zcash-based apps and services (i.e. more than just mobile apps).
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+1
I love making apps I have worked on and been in charge of apps that delivered services for millions of users. they are a full time project on their own. Iâve been part of teams that had the headcount of ZF and ECC combined just for one platform, doing releases every 15 days to 100 million users.
You know the saying âAnyone with a job can buy a car, but can they OWN it over the years?â
Great Apps are the same. They are hard to work with, their delivery is complicated and less than infallible, thereâs no F5 refresh on mobile apps. Updates donât propagate as fast as you would want, several software versions coexist, and if you succeed you will have a lot of users and also problems multiply by 10x or more.
Tooling is the best we can invest on, so that NH, Edge, Unstoppable, Ywallet, Zingo and hopefully other new teams do what they do best.
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Folks, as ECCâs Director of Engineering and as Product Owner for our SDK, Iâm here to give you an update on our progress.
Weâre committing to a timeline for the release of our mobile wallet SDK 2.0. This is so that others can plan around our expected timeline, and also hold us accountable to it.
As a reminder, making the ECC Mobile Wallet SDK is what we at ECC believe we can do right now to best serve our mission of creating a fair and open currency that protects the freedom, dignity, and consent of all people. The upcoming release of our SDK (version 2.0) will enable âSpend Before Syncâ, meaning that âsyncing/scanningâ will, we hope, disappear from the user experience and people will be able to use their ZEC without waiting.
We hope Nighthawk, Edge, and Unstoppable will be able to use this Spend-before-Sync feature right away to give their users no-waiting access to their ZEC, and in the future Zashi (ECCâs wallet) and Top Secret Unnamed Mystery Partner will, too.
If you like tech details, you can zoom into the internal details of our remaining tasks by looking at this graph, and specifically the part of it named âSpend-before-Syncâ (see screenshot). (The graph gets refreshed every 4 hours.)
When all of those green boxes are completed, SDK 2.0 is released.
Here is the timeline weâve committed to:
- #1179 and #1180 done this week.
- #730 and
#899#936 completed by Tuesday 2023-09-05 - Rest of the mobile code â code complete Friday 2023-09-08 excluding acceptance testing â put out SDK 2.0 Release Candidate
- Acceptance testing (using zashi beta) complete by Wednesday 2023-09-13, release day! Release SDKs 2.0 Final
- Ask for a thumbs up from Nighthawk, Edge, and Unstoppable that the release looks okay, make public announcement Friday 2023-09-15 if we get word from the wallet partners early enough or if not then public announcement on Monday 2023-09-18.
Okay, thatâs our plan! Please reach out to me with any questions. Thank you!
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