Hi Zeeps,
I just woke up after spending hours in bed, plotting to sleep and occasionally finding a bit of success, after arriving in Dubai almost 24 hours since leaving home. I’m just hoping to write something mildly coherent this morning. Wish me luck.
I’m in town because a lot of other people are in town because it is Token2049 - a Schelling point for all the crypto masses. Dinners get eaten, tokens get shilled, and deals get done; not sure how much sleep gets had. As I prepared for conversations this week, I pulled up a graphic presented at Zcon VI.
This is a summary of recent NPS polling of hundreds of Zcash users conducted by @peacemonger over the past couple of years. She broke it down into two types of users: those who hold ZEC and those who use (or transact in) ZEC. She also compared the number of Zcashers in general with those who are Zashi users.
Why the big jump from “absolute hell” in early 2023 to solid scores in 2025? This is because wallets have gotten easier and faster to use, and if you look at the data, Zashi in particular. Zashi adoption is also correlated with the growth of the shielded pool.
As the user experience goes, so will the acquisition and use of ZEC. Zashi adoption will drive Zcash adoption. For private payments at scale, we need a great user experience, with features and integrations that unlock secure storage and payments, with a protocol that scales to billions.
ECC is releasing Zashi 2.0 this coming week. We’ve listened to feedback from our users and thought carefully about how to remove any friction to onboarding, storage, and payments while also considering the impact of new features we intend to add in the coming months. Next up will be cross-chain payments using DEX services, allowing us to spend shielded Zcash, regardless of what currency the recipient accepts.
Dubai is ramping up the heat. So are we. Watch for the announcement, download it, use it, and let us know what you think!
Here’s what ECC added to the Zcash experience this week:
Zashi
Zashi Design
- Continued work on Cross-chain Payments designs
- Research on swap/cross-chain payment experience
- Finalizing Multi-Account & Address Rotation designs
- Small ad hoc product and engineering requested edits
- Final touches to Wallet Status Widget designs
Q&A and Dev Support
- User Support & debugging - email/forum/Discord
- Socials Management & Content Creation
- Community Management and participation in community calls
- Massive End-to-End release testing of Zashi 2.0
Zashi iOS
Zashi 2.0:
- Implemented the whole wallet backup flow UI/UX/logic
- Finished all Keystone UI/UX differences (added Buy instead of More option to allow users to use Coinbase Onramp, etc.)
- Implemented many, many 2.0 design changes and bug fixes
- Tested Zashi & fixed all reported bugs/feedback
SDK
- WIP: Refactoring the TOR implementation so we can get correlation issues under control
- Released SDK 2.2.12 for Zashi 2.0 adoption
Analytics Update:
- Unique Installs: 7.49k
- Total Downloads: 8.99k
- AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- New Crash Reporting Opt-in/out screen has been added
Released new Zashi version 1.5.2 (932) with Firebase Crashlytics opt-in/out- ZIP321: Scanning hotfix + error handling hotfix, addressed a bug where preferences observers were not notified about key/value pair deletion - this fixed a few issues, added a screen that shows up after opening app with a system camera
- Copy changed on the Transaction Detail screen
- Adopted SDK changes regarding sync progress reporting
- Implemented many, many 2.0 design changes and bug fixes
- Fixed issue with local env to build SDK - which took a lot of time
- Changed Sapling parameters download server
- Prepared new universal networking communication using new Tor APIs in the SDK
Analytics Update:
- Total Install Base: 3.82k
- Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 17.8k
- PlayStore Rating: 4.509*
Zcash Core
- This week has continued with the theme of last week; the core engineering team has spent a lot of time working on other community projects as we integrate them into Zallet, tracking down and mitigating bugs and API issues in zaino, zebrad and the zewif crate.
- Zallet is moving ahead, with the implementation of z_sendmany being now feature complete but we were blocked on testing it due to issues in our integration with zebrad via zaino up until the end of the week. For the benefit of alpha testers, Str4d also added a feature to generate a default Zallet configuration file and spent a bunch of time documenting the current Zallet spin-up process.
- The core team also provided some support to the Zashi 2.0 release, improving sync reporting and helping with the release process
Other
Polling has begun on Zcash funding governance and will run through May 1st. ECC, Shielded Labs, and the Zcash Foundation have all endorsed the C&C mode, as has @Zancas from Zingo Labs.
Binance did not delist Zcash, but it apparently has not removed the monitoring flag.
Participated in a Brave community call
I’ll be speaking on a privacy panel at Consensus in Toronto.
That’s all for this week.
Designing to scale,
Onward.