Breaking down "Fully Programmable"

[GGuy]

@Dodger

In the longer term, however, we want to see Zcash become fully programmable.

Thanks @dodgers. Hearing programmability is a long term goal is very exciting.

@David_Heisenberg

I think the terms “programmability” or “smart money” or even “wallets” are just kind of darts that can be thrown at the board to answer “what should be built next?” But I think a better question to ask is what each of those things may be enabling (applications, utility), what are the real use cases, what are we missing?

I also completely agree with @David_Heisenberg. So let me start. I’m open to anyone making other suggestions. Just an open discussion to try and get some ideas about what the community things should be a good goal around this.

DeFi

I think at least in the initial iteration I think it’s fair to look at calls for programmability as a call to enable DeFi. I think a broad initial goal would be to enable native defi in as many forms as possible.

Initial Types of DeFi

• Native exchanges
• ZEC backed assets
• Collateral and Lending
• Mutual Funds
• Insurance

Feature Requirements for DeFi

• Tokens (ZSAs)
• Asset locking
• Rollups/Sidechains

Optional/Future:

• ZSA Addresses (DAO like structures)

Enabling ZSAs, Asset Locking, Rollups/Sidechains

In Ethereum the ERC tokens, asset locking, and rollups are all made possible with programmable smart contracts. We could go down this same route too. But I’d argue we’d be better served enabling these as core features of Zcash. We’ve already started with ZSA development underway. I advocate ZF research and explore the possible options for enabling asset locking and sidechains.

Let me attempt to make a start at discussing these topics.

Asset locking

The issue with asset locking isn’t the locking of assets, rather, the ability to trust they will be unlocked/transfered under a set of conditions. I can think of two obvious ways to achieve this.

• On-chain programmable concensus (e.g. smart contracts)
• Partial on-chain threshold consensus (e.g. ZSA Addresses - see below)
• Off-chain threshold concensus (e.g. multisig or FROST - see below)

Off-chain FROST

My high level (noob) understanding is we could achieve some form of asset locking with a decentralised set of nodes all participating in producing a signature using frost. A special FROST address would accept assets. The FROST participants/nodes would be incentivised to do the right thing and unlock/transfer the assets when the appropriate condition is met or be penalised if they don’t. In many ways we could think of this as a form of off-chain programmability.

Luckily for us ZF has the very expert to advise on these matters (@dconnolly).

Rollups/Sidechains

It has become clear that L2 solutions (like Rollups) are almost certainly part of the scaling solution in the near term. In Zcash that might mean enabling sidechains. For sidechains to become effective we might need a couple of things.

• The ability to batch and merge a large number of transaction in a more efficient (and cheaper) manor.
• An easy step by step method to start a new sidechains

I think making this easy is key. How easy can we make it? Can we make it so that a user simply runs zebrad with a set of flags to start a new sidechain? Making it so easy that every blockchain developer cant help but try it might be a key to increasing adoption and experimentation.

Also do we want sidechains to be mostly compatible with existing wallets and tools? Will some sidechains want users to connect and transact using their existing wallets/tools? Can a wallet simply connect to a sidechain and transact as they would on the main chain?

Are ZSA Sidechains Secure?

My understanding is that from a security perspective we need to limit the leaked information from transacting on a “forked” chain which could leak information about the parent chain. This would mean a sidechains (at least presently) would need to transact using assets not available on the parent chain. One way around this would be for assets to be “issued” on the sidechains only once the assets have been locked on the parent chain.

There may still be some additional privacy concerns here but I believe they are more related to the size of the anonymity set potentially being smaller on the sidechains. But I’m no expert, just pondering out loud .

ZSA Addresses

I envisage ZSA Addresses are special addresses that are collectively controlled by the asset holders. Assets can be transfer into a ZSA Address by anyone. A predefined threshold could be set to require weighted consensus by asset holders before transfering (or issuing) assets.

This would enable a POS like systems where a ZSA Address is controlled by the ZSA holders who are running nodes. These nodes would be incentivised to do the right thing and transfer the funds somewhere once a certain set of rules (could be on-chain or off-chain) are met. In many ways this is a form of off-chain programmability.

[David_Heisenberg]

One thing to add is whether we are trying to build in a multi chain world or more of an interoperable world. Do we want to recreate everything that every other chain has or do we want to carve out a position for Zcash that fits within a greater, diverse crypto space. There are pros and cons for both approaches, and I’d be interested in having a discussion on that.

I sort of think branding zec/Zcash as a private gateway to the entire world of crypto is a better goal then rebuilding everything on Zcash and trying to attract mass amounts of liquidity there. Granted I have no idea how to get there technically.

One thing I can say though, is that I understand people in Zcash land are very disinclined to make big and potentially false promises. But it would be cool to hear talks at ZCON3 on something like “building our wildest dreams: the future of Zcash” from the most knowledgeable people in our community. There may be things that the experts think may be possible that the community has no idea of. How can we be expected to have an informed opinion of the future of Zcash when we don’t even know all the possibilities?

[GGuy]

I think we need to be clear about the end goal. We want to increase the value of ZEC. The caveat for Zcash is we want to do that while providing (optional?) privacy. The primary way we can achieve this is by make ZEC a privacy preserving store of value.

I believe the most important question that nobody has directly asked over the past few days is “how do we make ZEC an important store of value over other competing stores of value?”. ETH did it by becoming DeFi’s first choice for L1. I believe Zcash can compete with the likes of ETH as a store of value. Why? Our secret weapon. Scalability!

If someone wants to run an EVM on Zcash… Great go at it! If ZF want to support WASM? Cool! Create a sidechain and have fun! When someone wants to participate in these sidechains what asset do they use as collateral? ZEC!

How do we achieve all this? We invite everyone to create sidechains on Zcash. No restrictions. No barriers. Just pure joy.