Hi Zeeps,
Two years ago last week, I quit ECC, but I didn’t quit Zcash. Instead, I pushed for change. Little did I know that I would be back at ECC before the end of the year with the opportunity to lead it.
People often underestimate the impact they can have. I did. As it turns out, we can just do things. We can create the world we want to live in. We can create unstoppable private money.
In the post linked above, I urged the community to do the hard things to usher in a new era: to narrow our vision, change governance and funding, collude, and focus on distribution and user experience. In word and action, I risked burning bridges. Instead, my dear friends, we all came together to build new bridges.
For too long, Zcash operated on its own island, largely disconnected from the circuitry of the new internet being built all around us. That has changed. The built bridges are accelerating the distribution of ZEC while adding rich capabilities.
This week, ECC shipped Tor support in Zashi. We built Zashi, but it was Tor that built Arti, thanks to a grant from Zcash Community Grants (ZCG).
It’s not the first bridge built with Zashi over the last year and a half. Today, you can store your shielded ZEC on a Keystone hardware wallet (ZCG funded Keystone’s work) and spend it at 1000s of retailers thanks to the bridge with Flexa.
The bridges helped drive shielded adoption with the Zashi effect in full swing, as shielded pool growth is exponentially growing.
But it’s not just Zashi, not in the least. Also this week, our long-time ally and friend, Gemini, announced support for withdrawals to a unified address (UA), becoming the first exchange in the world to do so.
We are building bridges with Maya (with funding from ZCG) and NEAR (thanks to members of the NEAR ecosystem), and will soon be coming to Zashi. As of two weeks ago, you can now store your shielded ZEC in Metamask, following Brave’s browser support earlier this year.
We’re also bridges with like-minded influencers, KOLs, and newcomers as they post their addresses on Crypto Twitter and the community floods them with encrypted notes.
ZecHub is building bridges with Penumbra and Namada. Shielded Labs and ECC are building bridges with Ledger. And on it goes…
An underappreciated truth about bridges is that they have a multiplying effect. When Flexa adds retailers, ZEC holders get more places to spend. As dkit expands, Zcashers will have more places to swap. With NEAR, many in that ecosystem are adding support for ZEC, including Rhea and Leo DEX. Defi is now available to Zcashers. All of these are mutually beneficial, not extractive.
And the core developers across orgs are building new bridges with one another. The core development organizations are aligned like never before and have, for the first time, jointly compiled a roadmap for the next 18 months, allowing us to both work in parallel and together.
Even more, ZCG is now vetting grant applications with people who have knowledge and experience across the ecosystem to help make informed decisions on grant allocations. And grant recipients and the development organizations are working collaboratively with one another.
Even more, ECC and ZF continue to build bridges in Washington, DC through PGP, the Blockchain Association, and CoinCenter.
There are so many bridges being built between Zcash and others across the broader ecosystem. And this is just the beginning. The unlocks will be exponential.
By building bridges, we are building the unstoppable Zcash machine.
Keep building Zeeps!
Here’s what we built this week:
Zashi
Working on relationships with offboarding partners to make it easier to spend ZEC in more places. Integration will follow our work on NEAR and Maya, and is pending an agreement on commercial terms. We continue to work on analyzing recent Zashi-user polling.
What we did:
- Zashi 2.1 with Tor Protection was released!
- Development and internal testing of swap and pay with NEAR Intents.
What’s up next:
- NEAR Intents integration and testing for ZEC swaps and payments.
- Continued design work on multi-account and stablecoin support.
- Meeting with Coinsbee on integration exploration.
iOS Analytics
- Unique Installs: 9.21k
- Total Downloads: 11.1k
- AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Android Analytics
- Total Install Base: 3.8k
- Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 21.3k
- PlayStore Rating: 4.314*
Zcash Core
What we did:
- Figured out how to do P2SH multisig key generation based on BIP 48 and BIP 129.
- Initial draft of PCZT specification (zips#1063).
- Released zcash_protocol and zcash_keys with NU6.1 support.
- Merged halo2 ZSA changes.
What’s up next:
- Releasing Zallet alpha.
- Finish specification work for NU6.1.
- Finish support for send max and trusted/untrusted confirmations policy.
Other:
Icymi: https://x.com/katiebiber/status/1952725005181010001
I participated in the quarterly Agoric board meeting and got an early demo of their new product, YMax.
We continued working on an application for a retroactive grant for coinholder voting.
Building bridges,
Onward.