Brainstorm of potential grant concepts/ideas

Merchant support infrastructure. I think that it needs to be trivial for both online and brick-and-mortar merchants to be able to accept Zcash payments, taking advantage of Zcash’s unique capabilities that are made possible by viewing keys.

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Just a note here.

A few years ago, when I onboarded a few dozen of merchants to support Zcash in Greece, I asked them what was the main reason for not supporting crypto payments earlier. Their answer was that nobody wanted to spend crypto for buying stuff. This is not a chicken and egg problem. Users had and (now more than ever) have the ability to easily spend their crypto. But they won’t spend it because they would rather hold and sell when the price goes sky high. I’m not going to start a debate here about the merits of holding vs spending but if you ask any merchant, they will tell you the same thing. The biggest obstacle for adoption is the lack of users willing to spend, not merchants accepting crypto. For the merchants, the easiest part is to accept Zcash. They just download a wallet and that’s it. Or they can use a service like Coinpayments. The merchants don’t have any trouble accepting Zcash (and they don’t particularly care about shielded, but this is a separate discussion). 95% of the Greek merchants I spoke with, just used a mobile wallet and were not particularly interested in spending their crypto either at the time. They saw it as an alternative and extra income that they would rather invest (AKA hold) than convert to fiat. From the users’ POV, I can understand them too. For many jurisdictions, spending crypto triggers a taxable event. So why on earth would anybody want to spend their crypto on a regular basis and then have Uncle Sam up their ***. And it’s not just the taxable event but also the headache of accounting. So I would say the issue is a mix of regulation and collective consciousness on what crypto is and how it can be used.

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This is a great point!

To kind of add to it, the ZF funded the Anypay team to add Shielded Zcash to their POS system back in 2019 Add Zcash Support to the Anypay Merchant Payment System So That Customers Can Instantly Use Shielded and Transparent Zcash In Hundreds of Retail Stores With Zero Extra Effort to Businesses · Issue #28 · ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2 · GitHub

And they followed through, unfortunately for less than a year. When asked about why they said there was a lack of demand/ amount of TX to justify continuing support.

I was personally quite disappointed by this turn of events and funding for anything like this in the future should also include a set time period to support it as a requirement.

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You have companies like BlockFi, Fold, Coinbase & more launching crypto debit cards, credit cards to spend & earn crypto in cash back. We need to make ZEC available to users on their platform.

@anon16456014 highlights the biggest problem as I see it for newbies.

That is another post tho, I just realised what has happened here.

There is no recourse for a slick sales pitch? I think the MGRC should be demanding Proof of Concept code specific to zcash integration in light of this.

Was customer demand for the feature part of the grant? if not, who cares. If you get a grant to build a bridge no one will ever use, you build the bridge

He states that this is for both T and Z addresses. This is their latest app I just downloaded.

Shameful. just shameful.

WTF? Grants are now donations? is there no legal recourse for this? @antonie this is their latest app I just downloaded - If I am missing something, please let me know. I would love to see the postmortem for this project.

[quote=AnyPay PDF]
Hundreds of merchants across America are already using Anypay to take private
payments of cryptocurrencies.

They want to know instantly if the customer paid, and they want to know that
their money is secure. We have done all that and more, and now we want to add Zcash to
Anypay’s list of supported coins.

Zero user education is needed to use it securely. This tool increases the availability and
decentralization of Zcash in the world by spreading it around to merchants and inspiring crypto
users to switch to a more private currency.

I feel conned.

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Me too, they don’t even support basic ZEC anymore… smh…

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I have been saying for at least two years that demand for zcash is falling among users and owners of zec, this manifests itself in the form of refusal to buy, own, and therefore spend, the number of active addresses falls, which means all projects with real use are doomed to failure, anypay is a simple example now. The main drawback is the lack of marketing, you need to give examples of when it is better to use zec and not another currency, when implementing somewhere, start developing a direction and this is not the task of the company that implements, but of the companies that develop and support the project!
The fund and the ECC are to blame for the current situation, not the buyers, sellers, companies that accepted the zec for settlements. What will happen next when financing large projects if demand does not change, I guarantee nothing good, you need to increase demand !!!
Someone can answer the question unequivocally - “why use zcash and not another currency if confidentiality is not a priority for the overwhelming number of users” and another question for the future “Why use a currency with very low demand” - this question is asked by companies that think about support zec.
It is necessary to develop projects and not just support them with money, otherwise there will be a “dead city”.

Another solution to this is to design and implement a stablecoin on top of Zcash (I’ve seen it dubbed zUSD). There is actual real world usage of stablecoins and many stories of people taking loans to buy cars or whatever else they need the loan for. Not to mention the recent STABLE act which is trying to regulate the usage of stablecoins that came out a few days ago. There’s a lot that can be done for people to actually use Zcash as a means of exchange as opposed to store of value.

TLDR: Fund a stablecoin design on Zcash.

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looking for the community’s thoughts on wrapped.com as a ZcashOMG grant applicant for implementing shielded support using viewing keys…

Here’s some quotes for context from a recent tweet exchange I had…

“ we’re only able to run $wzec at @WrappedFi due to the existence of the t-addr. Otherwise anchorage, Gemini and other custodian / exchanges would delist overnight.”

“ There are four flavors of support:

  1. Depositing into an exchange z-addr → t-addr
  2. Depositing into an exchange z-addr → z-addr
  3. Withdrawing from an exchange z-addr → z-addr
  4. Withdrawing from an exchange t-addr → z-addr

wrapped.com can do number 1.

z-addr support (2 and 3) are the most interesting to me, as it properly takes advantage of the viewing keys, however I don’t see a reality where most people put in the effort to figure this out.”

One last thought I’d like to discuss is the role Gemini could play in making this a reality as they have already started down the shielded Zcash support path…

Not sure if they want a grant to do it.

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I would like to implement this idea: Programmatically through a wallet or through an application, create a master key (USB), which includes a read / write-protected portable wallet that has the ability to connect to a closed and secure gateway to perform transactions on any computer. On practice: I create a USB flash drive that gives me access to my zcash that are on it, password entry, work as a narrow client on different operating systems.

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I’ll put a link to an idea I submitted in another post here, that I believe simplifies uses and could push private address use by default.

There are currently two proposals on the forum, and three on the Grant platform.

Unfortunately no teams have stepped up yet to address making more wallets that support shielded transactions.

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Those offers are just people’s earnings, there will be 0 benefit from them, if ZOMG will sit and wait for great offers in an unpopular (of course popular but in a very narrow circle) coin, then apparently you need to wait a very long time, now ZOMG has about 700 thousand on its account dollars in zec, a lot of things can already be done with this money, it would not be bad to define directions and look for teams to implement them, don’t you think? You can sit and wait endlessly, and will we spend money on gateways at 13,000 per unit for 3 months?

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Whether to be proactive or reactive in finding grant applicants was a topic that came up during the MGRC debates to decide who would be on the MGRC (now ZOMG). There were arguments for both sides, and I think what most people came to was that we need to see the number and quality of grants coming down the pipeline the first few months before deciding if there needs to be proactive outreach. Personally, I think there needs to be proactive outreach and the Zcash community/ZOMG/other entities can greatly help with that in the new year.

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I also agree that we need to proactively seek out applicants.

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Regarding if we need a mixnet:

Zcash can’t scale if it requires every user to scan the entire blockchain for payments.
So, we need some other way to notify most users they received a payment.

One option is build a mixnet. Problem is, this can’t be a zcash specific mixnet. Because anonymity in mixnets is a function of concurrent users (to a first approximation your anonymity set is all concurrent users), you’d have much less privacy. And much less than Zcash’s on chain privacy which is, to a first approximation, based on all users of Zcash ever. So we need to get into an existing mixnet with usage. This might happen and there certainly are some promising projects out there.

The other option is for the majority of users to spend payment notifications out of band. @tromer and I have been working on one particular version of this on and off since the last Zcon. And thanks to @gmale @str4d and others it finally has the low level details in it. [Draft] Liberated Payments by gmale · Pull Request #420 · zcash/zips · GitHub. This lets you pay someone ZEC even if you don’t have their address (and even if they don’t have a wallet yet and have never heard of ZEC). It also avoids the nasty fat fingered an address/ sent to the wrong address problem : you’re sending a message over the whatsAp/signal/telegram account you already use with them. And until they confirm the funds, it’s reversible. And they never have to scan the blockchain

This proposal defines a mechanism for sending a Zcash payment encapsulated in a URI string. This enables sending Zcash funds over any secure channel, such as via a messaging app, even if the recipient does not yet have Zcash software installed and does not have a Zcash payment address. This is implemented by having the URI convey the secret spending key of an ephemeral Zcash “wallet address”, to which the funds have been transferred. Anyone who learns the URI can accept this payment, by a “finalization” process which uses the key given in the URI to transfer the encapsulated funds to their own wallet. After the payment is finalized, via a suitable on-chain transaction by the recipient, it becomes irrevocable.

This handles p2p payments. For merchants on the web, you can submit payment notification information /txid as part of the payment process. This should be automated, but is doable.

And then anyone who wants maximal privacy can run a full node and scan. And you should do that anyway.

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I am not as deep in the technical weeds, but I am pretty sure that there is a way in Ethereum to prove your account balance and previous transactions by checking the most recent X blocks (I think you do stuff with patricia tree merkle roots?). Is that an option?

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It’s probably similar to Ethereum other than you can’t ask someone else to do it. “scan the entire blockchain” is once. You do this incrementally, checking if each block contains payments to you. If you’ve already checked the block or your address was made after that block, then you don’t need to scan it again.

So its an ongoing thing you do work on. It’s never finished. But you never have to repeat work unless something goes wrong.

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It’s easier for Ethereum to do this, because they use an account-based model. You only need to know that the current chain state is valid, and then you can just take the most recent balance as the correct current balance. In UTXO-based chains like Zcash, where your balance is the sum of unspent notes you’ve received, you need a whole-chain view to obtain a correct balance. Even if you used some kind of “save-point” mechanism for the notes you know about, anyone (who knows your address) can send you a new note at any time, which requires a notification mechanism as @secparam described.

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