Building our car for combat. ECC Update

Ecosystem Updates
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Hi Zeeps,

“[They] all have us beat on the straights. Our shot is battling in the turns. We need to build our car for combat.”
“How am I supposed to make that safe?”
“Who said anything about safe?”

We are fast approaching the new F1 season. As I wrote that, I got the chills. It does that to me. I went to a race for the first time last year. What a thrill.

I wrote about my love for it once before when Lando Norris of team McLaren pulled off his first-ever win. I didn’t know then that the win was a turning point for the season. Until then, Red Bull dominated with the fastest car. But McLaren would go on to win the season, thanks to a breakthrough in engineering.

McLaren had discovered something that propelled them to the front. It had nothing to do with the power unit (the engine); they had discovered new science and changed the front wing.

The front wing is one of the most critical components of the car. It’s where wind meets carbon. It provides downforce to keep the tires on the track, manages airflow, and minimizes drag, among other things. It’s made of stiff carbon, and the engineers have the task of shaping it just the right way to maximize performance in both slow corners and fast straightaways.

Then, someone at McLaren had a breakthrough. What if we can use the wind to bend the shape of the carbon, and by bending the carbon, we can optimize grip? When the car moves slowly through corners, the carbon will be stiff, which reduces understeer. When it’s fast in a straight, the wing will bend, which reduces oversteer. They debuted their new aero-elastic wing in Miami last year and went on to the Constructor’s Championship for the season.

Winning doesn’t happen by accident. In F1, it’s a cocktail of engineering, driver skill, collective skill, and a bit of luck. It’s the same here; it’s the same everywhere. It is not one person. It is not one skill.

Winning outcomes require high-performing teams. A common mission, deep expertise, complementary skills, and high trust unite high-performing teams. You must have all of these. We have that team at ECC.

I have a no-asshole rule. It’s a cancer in a team. Even if they are the most skilled, assholes kill trust. I’ve fired some of the highest-skilled people I’ve known from my teams because they were assholes. My highest-performing teams were asshole-free.

We need that across our teams in the ecosystem as well. We aren’t racing against one another. And our competition is not just other projects on the market cap leaderboard. We are racing against institutions that want to own the very track we race on. We are racing against nation-states who do not want us to store our wealth privately.

To win, we must get our drivers in the cockpit. We must listen to how the car moves for them, what is working or not working. We must feed that information back to our engineers and give them the encouragement, resources, and space to find creative ways to solve hard problems. And we must intentionally test our designs on real tracks, in the heat of competition, in the real world.

To win, we must do this as a community with a collective mission, deep expertise, complementary skills, and high trust. We will build our car for combat, and we will win.

Here’s how we were winning this week:

Zashi (@Andrea)

Zashi Design (Pablo)

  • Exploration and discovery work for Zashi Vault
  • Adhoc stakeholder and engineering edits and improvements
  • Adjustments to the Keystone signing screen
  • Designing Zashi Vault mockups (15+ new screens)

Q&A and Dev Support (@decentralistdan)

  • QA testing for Zashi F-droid release
  • Tax Export feature testing
  • Zcon Coordination
  • Zashi Website content aggregation
  • Zashi/ECC/zcash socials
  • Begin ECC Discord revamp
  • Handling user support communication
  • Near Intents research & testing

Zashi iOS (@Lukas)

  • Tax Export feature
    • Implemented a dependency handling the data export
    • Implemented UI and flows
  • Resolved GitHub CI action failures due to macos14 drop of support of xcode16
  • PRs reviewed & merged SDK PRs for the Transaction History redesign
  • Adopted redactPCZTForASigner
    • Tested it, identified a latency issue in Zashi → and fixed it :mechanical_arm:
  • Adopted sapling params PCZT check, which seems to resolve Keystone Send issue :sparkles: (Thanks @str4d!)
  • Made progress on UserMetadata serialization but realized much more complex handling is needed when remote storage is part of it
    • Created a document describing the challenges and our options

Analytics Update:
Unique Installs: 6.48k
Total Downloads: 7.73k
AppStore Rating: 4.9*

Zashi Android (Milan)

Released Zashi through Github and F-Droid!

  • Alternative Deployment (coop with @Yasser)
  • F-Droid FOSS app build
    • Resolved app signing issues
    • Fixed about 1 million other blockers :right-facing_fist::skin-tone-4::left-facing_fist::skin-tone-4:
    • Working on reproducible builds
    • Prepared GitHub .apk release
  • SDK PCZT API changes adopted
  • Implemented persisted transaction metadata encryption
  • Implemented Tax Export feature

Analytics Update:
Total Install Base: 3.56k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 14.7k
PlayStore Rating: 4.477*

Zcash Core (@nuttycom)

This week, the core team’s primary efforts have been to prepare and release the librustzcash crate stack. Here’s a list of the new releases for this week:

These crate releases represent, in the aggregate, release to our users of work that has been completed since mid-December, including no_std support that was required for use in hardware wallets, support for connecting to lightwalletd over TOR for transaction submission and retrieval, support for wallet metadata encryption, additional improvements to the pczt crate, and numerous other cleanups and improvements throughout the crate stack. Detailed changelogs for each release can be found at the links provided above.

These changes were also integrated into the mobile wallet SDKs.

We also worked on the specification of ZIP 325, account metadata keys: ZIP 325: Account Metadata Keys by str4d · Pull Request #979 · zcash/zips · GitHub.

Next week, we are planning additional releases of shardtree, zcash_client_backend, and zcash_client_sqlite to provide support for transparent wallet recovery, address rotation and to fix some longstanding note commitment tree corruption bugs.

Other

We hit 2M ZEC in the shielded pool!

Speaking of pools, this is the Orchard pool. What caused the significant upticks? It’s no accident that the dates coincide with the Zashi launch and Zashi + Keystone.

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I spent considerable time on our current financial position. I will share more at my ECC session at ZconVI.

@peacemonger surveyed the community to get your feedback on Zashi Vault. Please help us shape Zashi’s future. We’ll have some things to show you at ZconVI! Some of you have been giving her feedback via interviews. Thank you!

@paulbrigner was asked to be the industry expert on Virginia’s Joint Commission on Technology and Science Blockchain Advisory Committee.

This week’s PGP is focused on digital identity. ​Please RSVP if you plan to attend in person! You can also watch the live stream on YouTube, LinkedIn, and X, beginning at 10 am ET.

Brave shielded support is available in Brave Nightly!

We are finalizing draft ZIPs for the zBloc and Community + Coinholder Funding Mechanism and will release them for review and feedback this week.

I will be in Denver for meetings most of the week, with everyone coming in for Eth Denver. If you are going to be here, let me know!

That’s all for this week.

Building for combat, building to win.

Onward.

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Thanks Josh & ECC!

Must correct the record, we were experimenting with the dashboard and mistakenly included lockbox ZEC in shielded supply.

Lockbox supply is neither Transparent or Shielded. Now we know :slight_smile:

We are about 10k ZEC from 2M, shields up.

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I was wondering about the delta between what I was seeing on Zechub and CM. Thanks for clarifying.

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Here is updated total as of right now:

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(adjusted to take out LB)

Let’s just round up, the trend is clear :shield:

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And what does that mean? there can be 4 large hands that have filled this pool or have almost the entire amount there.

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good luck in Denver,
and fruitful meetings

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As you said, the Zcash Shielded Pool could have been filled by four large holders. On the other hand, it could have been filled by many people.

No one knows. This is the importance of privacy.

Both those with large sums of money and those with small amounts have the right to privacy.

Only then can everyone trust and use Zcash.

This is the Zcash you own.

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i have some positive points about it

The more coins in the shielded pool is a bigger anonymity set.
The more coins in the shielded pool the better, just as staking, the more percentage of the coins are staked, the better the project looks to outsiders.
I also think that its many new people shielding their coins, because nowadays its possible to do with a hardware wallet.

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Just want to mention to folks If you choose to run a full node, you have access to a lot of interesting data! You can also read our weekly newsletter for those who want an easy to read snapshot.

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