Hi Zeeps,
What does it mean to be truly in control of your outcomes: to be free to choose, act, and belong on your own terms?
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) argues that humans flourish when three needs are met:
Autonomy: I choose.
Competence: I can.
Relatedness: I’m not alone.
I felt this pull as a kid flipping through Choose Your Own Adventure books. They promised choice but only within narrow, pre-written paths. I loved the optionality and the unknown. But I yearned for more options and more freedom to shape the story myself.
Soon after, I discovered something similar in video games like Kings Quest, Space Quest and, yes, Leisure Suit Larry (don’t tell my mom). There was much more to solve and explore. It felt more open and exciting, but there were severe limits to freedom.
Today’s open-world games don’t just offer options, they offer agency. They let you ignore the main quest entirely if you want. Fish. Wander. Play your way. It’s a natural evolution as it mirrors what SDT tells us: we thrive when we’re trusted to move freely in the world.
But with money? We’ve been stuck in King’s Quest. US-regulated stablecoins, KYC-heavy CEXs, and surveillance-tethered tools offer only the illusion of freedom with a handful of pre-approved paths, all monitored, all conditional. You can trade, as long as someone else approves. You can hold, until someone else freezes it.
With Zcash, we’re creating a multi-player open world engine. It’s the evolution of the game. A strong user-experience with self-custody and privacy at scale provides autonomy. The constantly evolving open source protocol that empowers everyone honors competence. And this fosters relatedness between decentralized builders, the community, and economic actors.
We’re designing and building all this outside the legacy system, not to burn down the rails of the past, but to provide a better option that more closely mirrors the nature by which we are as human beings. Zcash isn’t here to offer a few narrow pre-determined choices. In our collective game, you are the creator.
Happy journeys.
Here’s what ECC added to the map this week:
Zashi
Zashi Design
- Adjusting Send/Receive icons on all designs in Zashi Blueprint file
- Adjusting marketing graphics (App Store and Play Store)
- Continued work on Cross-chain Payments designs (research into SwapKit and Near)
- Initial Zashi landing page exploration designs
- Learning about new products and features from Config 2025
Q&A and Dev Support
- Release testing iOS 2.0.2
- User Support Issues (DIscord/email)
- Community Management
- Socials Management
- Supporting product research efforts
Zashi iOS
Zashi 2.0:
- Worked mostly on 2.0.2 version with a massive list of fixes and updates
- Released Zashi 2.0.2
- Updated Tor SDK and received another batch of comments - iteration is WIP
- Research Spike: Near 1 Click API, SwapKit, Maya, WalletConnect
Analytics Update:
Unique Installs: 7.71k
Total Downloads: 9.28k
AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- Investigating user reported issues
- UI tweaks and improvements for Zashi 2.0.2 in progress
- Working on the Tor tx submission implementation and resolving issues
- Started looking into Near 1ClickAPI documentation
Analytics Update:
Total Install Base: 3.77k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 18.3k
PlayStore Rating: 4.509*
Zcash Core
- The results of polling on funding are in. Our conclusion is that they support inserting an NU6.1 in the timeline. We are clear on what needs to be done spec- and implementation-wise, in collaboration with ZF.
- librustzcash and SDKs: Tor reliability improvements, backports of librustzcash crate stack for zcashd.
- Zallet: Added OpenRPC support, fixed seed fingerprint hex byte order, working on z_sendmany.
- Continued reworking of ZeWIF code.
- Research and auditing: Experiments with use of Lean for expressing security properties of circuits and proof systems, reviewed the Namada airdrop protocol.
That’s all for this week.
Immersed in the game,
Onward.