Dev fee proposal - Thesis

Hello folks!

Now that the Zcash Foundation has responded to the NU4 community sentiment collection in favor of ZIP 1012, a pragmatic reworking of our ZIP, I wanted to publish our initial proposal to work alongside the ECC as one of the teams behind Zcash, as well as our vision for Zcash as the privacy layer for the Internet of Money.

I’ve posted the proposal on Github, where I’ll update the text as we receive feedback.

At Thesis, we’d be thrilled for the opportunity to work on a project that’s so closely aligned with our values of self-sovereignty, privacy, and opt-in culture.

While we hope to be selected by the ZF as a pioneer team joining Zcash development, I also hope that releasing this proposal early can help iron out what teams need when choosing work in this space, as well as a sketch of the process that we, the ZF, and the ECC might use to work together to drive the adoption of Zcash.

Excited to continue the discussion!

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What’s the argument for deprecating zcashd?

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There’s a bunch of baggage from Satoshi’s client that slows down development work. It’s not a hard requirement by any means, but I’ve heard interest from both the ECC and ZF in jettisoning the old code.

I’d like to see a Go client regardless. If I’ve misread that take on zcashd it’s less pressing.

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Thanks for this @mhluongo! (and your extremely valuable contributions to the dev fund discussion)

I’m going to refrain from providing feedback until the NU4 ZIP is in a more final state and the major grant process more defined but I appreciate your zeal (:zebra::zebra::zebra:) for contributing to the ecosystem.

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Thanks for sharing. Was very interesting to read.

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Hm, I have ran across this sentence on a trading idea on tradingview. It has been bugging me ever since that I dont understand what it means. Maybe you can help me understand it as I suspect to be connected to your work.

“Zcash could be in demand on all decentralized exchanges to hide “buying and selling power”. Actually there are too many use-cases for it and I think that privacy coins will be in great demand in coming months, years.”

Is the claim "Zcash could be in demand on all decentralized exchanges to hide “buying and selling power”. first of all true. If it is true could you please try and explain it to me? I am very interested in interesting use cases for ZEC

I asked on Twitter about shared beneficial ownership with other entities. Matt indicated he was not aware of any. It’s important that the community is aware of potential shared interests.

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I think there’s some demand for “dark pools”, but decentralizing them is not trivial. I think a private off-ramp for tokens, and a decentralized on-ramp for Zcash, is more immediately useful.

Would love to see a private DEX on Zcash one day though.

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Thanks! Here’s the Twitter thread for reference.

I’m hoping as part of this process to share our cap table and see all other fee recipients’ as well so we can be confident.

Frankly your unwillingness to disclose all of this back when we were talking about it weeks and months ago doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in me at all. Sry

He couldnt because he couldnt know which proposals the community supported and if the community supported the major grants proposal.

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I’m not sure what you mean? I made this clear on all of the dev calls, in the ZIP, and throughout the forum discussion

From the ZIP:

At Keep, we’ve done some work around Zcash, and our parent company, Thesis, is considering investing more heavily in Zcash development for our latest project.

My perspective is as the founder of a for-profit company focused on building self-sovereign technolog

And then, under a section called “disclosures”

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to make a few professional disclosures.

I’m the largest shareholder of Thesis, the parent company and studio behind Fold and Keep. Thesis is a for-profit company that might benefit from this proposal as a dev fee recipient. While today I maintain exclusive control of Thesis, the company has taken outside investment in the past.

As far as my financial interest in Zcash, I’ve held a small amount of ZEC since shortly after launch. I’m in the process of building my personal ZEC position, as well as a position at Thesis.

From the ZIP proposal thread, where I mention running a candidate team a number of times

EDIT: More references to the past discussion

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I’m going to speak candidly, I believe your words were something like I’m purposefully withholding details until further along in the zip process
This implies to me ulterior motives beyond what’s in the best interest of the Zcash community because I don’t know how withholding any details about the future development funding mechanism for Zcash, when the entire point was to deliberate and specify the details, is in the best interest of the Zcash community at all
Again, sorry

Ah, you mean why I didn’t write a proposal for Thesis earlier? @tromer and I discussed this a bit I believe. I didn’t want to poison the well and overly steer the governance discovery process. The process needed to be about what was best for Zcash – and now that sentiment has been collected I’m comfortable engaging directly as a candidate.

I was trying to be principled – hopefully other folks see it that way as well.

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Yes, @mhluongo stated clearly on the forum that he intends to submit a proposal, and that he’s holding off on the details to avoid distractions from the high-level discussion.

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I’m unable to understand how that is a. Acceptable B. Should be, in this specific instance, interpreted as something other than trying to change consensus

Personally I really like what you proposed, especially ZEC on Ethereum and getting ZEC on some censorship resistant DEX’s.

Edit: Just curious, why write a client in Go language specifically? Also, it would be cool if your team or someone else built a bridge over to Tezos as well. :slight_smile:

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It’s a popular lang in the space and it’s one of our primary stacks. There are only a few choices for this sort of work, and most newer L1 clients like this are Go or Rust.

The big goal here is derisking the tech debt that zcashd represents.

Agreed. We’ve chatted a bit with the TQ folks, I wonder if they could help here as well?

EDIT: Added rationale

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You can see on GitHub that I wrote this proposal a couple nights ago. I’ve been gathering feedback on the workstream throughout this process.

I’m not sure what else you would have me do, but we might just have to agree to disagree.

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Agree that zcashd has huge technical debt…I was just reading about how Bitcoin uses an ‘obfuscation key’ to jumble the data on disk so it doesn’t trigger antivirus software…what a weird design choice.

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