Dev Fund 2024: Community Poll & Discussion Megathread

[joris]

Fair enough, you seem to be level headed here and your relationship with others makes your opinion incredibly useful.

[Chammy]

Absolutely.

It is not dfficult to argue that Zcash’ main function so far has been to enrich founders & friends (at the expense of Zcash holders, of course)

I mean, it is not for no reason that the crypto masses consider Zcash to be little more than a honeypot for the powers that be, and won’t touch ZEC with a stick.

I believe this reputational damage likely is irreversible, and that therefore the best hope for the tech to ever see mass adoption will be through its deployment by alternative, “less scammy” projects.

It is all really sad, to be honest.

[noamchom]

@earthrise

To use PoS as an example, rather than making “Move to PoS” our goal, we should rally around something like…

• It’s possible to spin up a secure Zcash validator in no more than a day’s work.
• ZEC holders can use the wallet they are most familiar with to start staking in no more than 5 minutes.
• Stakers have confidence in the security of their staked/delegated funds.

By thinking this way, it’s no longer just about making the best technical designs for the PoS protocol. Things like wallet integrations, front-end validator software and user guides become first-class citizens in the development effort.

This is correct, and as recent history shows, the potential PR sell for the Halo upgrade was badly bungled up. The schedule delayed so many times that the crypto industry seemingly lost interest. In the meantime, it is obvious that there was never a product delivery plan… something that could boil down and add some excitement to what had happened. Hearing a software engineer occasionally mention trusted setups are bad in a podcast or an interview did not really churn up a mainstream understanding about how huge of an advancement Halo was.

In the approach to Proof of Stake, we’ve got to make the Electric Coin Company accountable to the creation and execution of a product delivery plan. The ECC is spending too much resources not to responsibly bring this to market with an impact and results focused strategy.

@jeangrey

While Zcash may have 401 cryptography, we are still in 101 business class. These are simple ideas, but somehow hard for Zcash.

We talk all day about the morality of the Dev Fund people. The answer is staring everyone in the face. Make Zcash actually usable and then you will have the money to do open-ended research projects. Not the other way around. Without happy and satisfied Zcash users TODAY, you will not have your funding tomorrow.

If we can’t even get a market cap 2% of Bitcoin with everything that has been done so far, we won’t with POS, Zebra, ZSAs. Why? Because it will be run by people with the same mindset as right now.

Similar to the above, there is too much at stake for Zcash to fail because its never been treated like a serious business endeavor with an appetite to dominate. Part of the criteria for success must be the valuation of ZEC. Users of ZEC are in a primary sense investing their money because they are under an unwritten agreement that ZEC is a valuable asset that will accrue value over time. The ZEC performance of recent years has left many if not all ZEC users with bad losses.

I find it in bad judgement that ECC is spending such a large amount of focus, energy, and capital on all of these contemporary and unmeasurable lobbying efforts. The ZEC from the Dev Fund are to fuel the Zcash ecosystem success for decades into the future! I’m totally stumped that so much is being sunken into these short sighted and materially value-neutral activities (that the community has no influence over). I worry that the ECC lobbying efforts in America could be biased to their organizations regulatory risk concerns.… brokering potentially unregistered securities in America could carry very significant consequences if the SEC were to take those actions. Look at what has been happening to Library Coin.

Zcash is a global, and presumably nation-state neutral, ecosystem so its tough to try and logically validate the over emphasis on spending so much in these short sighted American political adventures.

In a post-Dev Fund world, I would be much less concerned about how the ECC were prioritizing American political lobbying because those resources spent wouldn’t be under the presumptions of the common values espoused as why the Dev Funding solution exists in the first place.

In a post Dev Fund world, we won’t have to hear all of the negative feelings about Zcash as an insider’s honeypot et et al. Post Dev Fund is the ecosystem that Zcash is ready for in November 2024!

[pkr]

Less comedy. More growth and product strategy. Thanks.

[conradoplg]

(Disclaimer: I’m a ZF dev, not sure how to display that next to my name here. But not speaking on behalf of ZF)

@refinance

FROST isn’t some mathematical mystical marvel demanding years of work for implementation.
The research paper made its debut back in 2020. And while it is surely deserving of praise,
it is yet a reformulation of the Shamir Shared Secret algorithm.

It’s not just a reformulation, it builds on top of it. Naive application of Shamir requires recreating the secret in memory, which is dangerous. FROST allows creating a signature without recreating the secret. Of course there are other similar threshold signature schemes but FROST only has two rounds and is undergoing the RFC process.

@refinance

Now, with Bitcoin also embracing Schnorr Signatures with the Taproot upgrade, FROST is usable to their users too.
It’s disheartening, truly, to witness another breakthrough in technology being squandered by ZF’s leadership, seemingly in pursuit of sustaining their funding.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-and-frost-improve-bitcoin-privacy

That would be difficult to prevent from happening. Like you said FROST is not that difficult to implement (our implementation itself has been ready for a while, but there’s a lot of additional stuff required to get it deployed) so we couldn’t block that with a license like happened with Orchard/Halo. The only other option would be a patent but that’s extremely controversial and every patented crypto algorithm ends up not being used because it’s just not worth the hassle.

Threshold signatures being used by other projects was just a matter of time, and would require the Zcash ecosystem to support them too, to not stay behind. If they choose FROST I see that as a great thing since we already have a head start.

[joris]

Any chance Ecc and Zf opens up all their work calendars, jira boards, time sheets, etc…? That could clear up doubts and increase transparency towards the community.

• Yes
• No

[noamchom]

Based on the fact that ECC is spending a monthly $200,000-300,000 on “Growth and Regulatory” yet we have no tangible Growth or Regulatory results to cheer about in the past year or two, it would be a greatly welcomed operational transparency olive branch for the global Zcash ecosystem to get more granular insight as to what is really happening among all of these ECC resources and their friends in the transient American political infrastructure.

Just imagine how quickly the ZCG would reject an RFP for $200,000 a month to be spent on political lobbying and hand-waving growth work that results in no measurable outcomes.

In a post Dev Fund situation, the ECC will be much more responsibly “on their own” to spend their funds lobbying the American political infrastructure to their hearts desire. But in the Zcash ecosystem of today, this heavy Dev Fund spending just feels and appears fruitless and it is not something that the community has voiced a majority of support for.

[earthrise]

I’m going to try to change the direction of this discussion a little bit. The most important questions we should be asking ourselves are what do we want to see Zcash accomplish over the next 4 years? and what’s the best way to make those things happen? What are all of your thoughts on these questions?

[joris]

• I want Zcash to be a coin accepted in most defi protocols, like MKR or AAVE

  • We need to convince these protocols to accept Zcash as collateral
  • We need to incentivize whales to provide liquidity
  • We need bridges to be built

• I want coins in wallets to be highly available

  • We need to have public benchmarks daily and ensure syncing a wallet with different coindays old is taking acceptable time. And we need a way to alert in case syncing times deteriorate

• I want Zcash to be completely neutral from any politics. Zcash isn’t the US democrat Party or progressists’s echo chamber. Failure to do so can repulse individuals from participating in the community

  • We need to get rid of the CoC dogwhistles items
  • We need to make it clear using devfund to promote things unrelated to Zcash (like promoting funding abortion) is out of scope and cannot be funded.
  • A breach of this means sanctions if you are in a privileged position (you lose your seat if you were to be elected to the Zf board for example) or you lose funding if you are a grantee

• I want accountability in how devfund is used. No more shadow budgets, you’re not special. Ultimately, I’d like a single devfund recipient, representative of the community and that distribute grants to legacy Zf/Ecc members. Unrestricted funding to become a thing of the past.

• I want the Zcash trademark minefield to be removed. It can be used as a weapon against the community if the trademark owner decide to do so. I also want anything built thanks to the devfund to belong to the Zcash community instead of a separate entity.

• I want technical debt to be a thing of the past. Zebrad becoming the official node where efforts to be focused on and zcashd is retired.

• The shielded pools numbers are too small and we need to reverse steam. I want transparent addresses to be a 2nd class citizen within Zcash, meaning all wallets funded “hide” transparent address support unless a user really wants them. I want a task force at ECC or Zf to encourage exchanges to upgrade to z-addresses only.

• I want bad PR to be a thing of the past. If you are a devfund recipient, think twice before tweeting or have a communication professionnal review your comms when it is about Zcash. We suffer bad memes from such bad PR.

[pkr]

@joris

• The shielded pools numbers are too small and we need to reverse steam. I want transparent addresses to be a 2nd class citizen within Zcash, meaning all wallets funded “hide” transparent address support unless a user really wants them. I want a task force at ECC or Zf to encourage exchanges to upgrade to z-addresses only.

Really only going to get there with hardware wallet support (which seems like it might come to Ledger, but Trezor is still a toss-up).

[earthrise]

@joris

I want accountability in how devfund is used. No more shadow budgets, you’re not special. Ultimately, I’d like a single devfund recipient, representative of the community and that distribute grants to legacy Zf/Ecc members. Unrestricted funding to become a thing of the past.

This is an interesting idea. I think a lot of the problems we’ve faced have come from the funds being fragmented between multiple orgs and, as a result, the projects we fund don’t have to work together and aren’t all aiming at a single good bet at what will make Zcash a success.

However, I think directing all funds towards a pool for grants would make that problem worse. If everything were funded by individual grants, it would lead to even more fragmentation and disconnected projects. IMO, what we need is a large pool of funds to be allocated to a strong group of leaders with a solid vision that the whole community can rally behind, who are trusted with leeway to execute their vision without excessive bureaucracy, and are held accountable for their performance.

We need active leadership and direction—meaning envisioning a product suite and marketing approach and executing it as a whole unified effort—whereas grants funding—just approving or denying requests that come in—is too passive to build all the things Zcash needs to succeed.

[earthrise]

@earthrise

The most important questions we should be asking ourselves are what do we want to see Zcash accomplish over the next 4 years? and what’s the best way to make those things happen?

I’ll answer my own questions:

1. [6 months] Get rid of the zcashd codebase and have ECC release a full node based on Zebra. There is so much technical debt in zcashd that it’s become a massive resource sink. Getting rid of zcashd will immediately cut all of those maintenance costs, prevent the waste that comes from implementing all of the consensus rules twice, unlock ZF to help ECC with core protocol development, and make the network less likely to suffer an accidental chain split due to divergences in the consensus rule implementations.
2. [6 months] Write usable libraries that developers can use to interact with Zcash that don’t require an understanding of any protocol internals. Make Zcash accessible in all of the top-10 programming languages, and write exceptional docs, promoted on the main website, that inspire devs to work with and build on Zcash. When necessary, make it especially easy to use Zcash by following a ZGo-like model, where users upload their viewing keys to have transactions processed for them.
3. [3 months] Cross-platform GUI wallets for Zcash.
4. [3 months] Revamp of https://z.cash/ to offer “official” desktop and mobile wallets with an easy direct download and app store links, a “developers” section that makes Zcash look like a really fun thing to build with, and a “technology” section written by good science communicators to explain why Zcash is superior tech. Also make it easy to find out about useful community projects through the main website.
5. [3 months] A usable command-line interface for Zcash, made available in most Linux distro’s repos, so that we have something those technical folks would love to use.
6. [12-24 months] Get rid of the trial decryption paradigm. Make Zcash transactions nearly as performant as the instant-messaging apps we’re used to, but with better metadata-resistance privacy, and with the ability to send money.
7. [12 months] Decide on a specific community that we want to market Zcash to, reach out to them to learn from their experiences trying to use Zcash, and make changes to our software accordingly. Personally, I would target online sex workers. It’s a completely legal industry worth billions of dollars yet they are subject to financial censorship by PayPal, VISA, etc. They are also victims of being deplatformed by the social media sites they rely on to market themselves; a scalable Zcash could potentially even be used to build a censorship-resistant social media through an extended version of the memo field.
8. [6 months] Build a browser extension that makes all Zcash functionality easily accessible to websites, similar to how MetaMask is used within DEX/NFT websites, with amazing docs that make using its API feel welcoming and exciting.
9. [3 months] Bring shielded hardware wallets over the finish line.
10. [24 months] Proof of Stake, fully implemented so that all Zcash shielded wallets support delegated staking and so that it’s easy to run your own validator securely.

This adds up to 7.5 years, but if we assume at least two things are going on in parallel at all times, it’d take about 4 years or less.

I like these goals because (a) they are measurable and lead to a demonstrable increase in Zcash’s usability, (b) they focus on making Zcash attractive to devs who will come and build their killer apps on top of Zcash, and (c) development efforts are made in collaboration with a very specific base of potential users who give us a feedback loop that allows us to tailor our products to their needs and to make them work in the real world.

Please keep the ideas coming, let’s hear more thoughts on what Zcash can become!

[joshs]

I keep hearing that Synthetix governance model is working well - separating decision making and funding decisions by functional area. I don’t have any direct experience but it looks intriguing.

[David_Heisenberg]

The beauty of the dev fund is that theoretically it can self-fund all the things you talked about instead of having to rely on outside capital which would want to capture value to its owners/investors. But the question is, does the “ZEC only” model of equity have enough incentive alignment? I do think it does if we can kickstart the “virtuous cycle” by increasing the value of ZEC through improved usability and adoption tactics. It also relies strongly on agile governance mechanisms to allocate resources well.

[GGuy]

@earthrise

IMO, what we need is a large pool of funds to be allocated to a strong group of leaders with a solid vision that the whole community can rally behind, who are trusted with leeway to execute their vision without excessive bureaucracy, and are held accountable for their performance.

We need active leadership and direction—meaning envisioning a product suite and marketing approach and executing it as a whole unified effort—whereas grants funding—just approving or denying requests that come in—is too passive to build all the things Zcash needs to succeed.

I need to highlight and second this. I believe this can help address many of the fundamental issues currently expressed and felt by many of us.

[noamchom]

@earthrise

[24 months] Proof of Stake, fully implemented so that all Zcash shielded wallets support delegated staking and so that it’s easy to run your own validator securely.

Yes. Shielded Staking.

[Milton]

I like what is on your list, but I feel like it is neglecting the very real threat that Zcash use and development might be banned in every major jurisdiction. We literally saw a tornado cash developer get arrested in the Netherlands under a year ago. I am not saying it is inevitable, (the US Supreme Court could prevent a ban on development), but it would be irresponsible to not prepare for the scenario where zcash has to be run as an underground network.

There needs to be integrated network level privacy for both validators and wallets. We also need to keep the validator requirements low to enable a large set of validators. We probably need to find some way to make the chain smaller, like more efficient zk-proofs or something. Proof of stake is also pretty important from a censorship resistance view, because we can fork out compromised stake, we can’t fork out malicous mining power.

[GGuy]

@earthrise

The most important questions we should be asking ourselves are what do we want to see Zcash accomplish over the next 4 years? and what’s the best way to make those things happen? What are all of your thoughts on these questions?

Keep in mind my list is not exclusive. I agree with many of @earthrise’s points and some of the already ongoing work in the ecosystem. Also we need to be agile and update these lists on an ongoing basis. By my list as of today with cost estimates in USD:

1. [Millions] - A Suite of Native Apps - ZecShielded, ZecTransparent, ZecStorage, ZecChat, ZecChrome, ZecFile, ZecPassword, etc. All have a similar professional look and feel. All are aware of each other and can launch each other and pass data when necessary. This can’t be done without a focus on APIs as mentioned by @earthrise. (Names of apps are placeholders)

2. [Millions] - Financial Instruments - Add support for native financial instruments. QEDIT is already exploring “options” (i.e. atomic swaps). Withstanding a review of how options pan out we should consider what it would take to support other financial instruments like futures.

3. [Millions] - Research and Feasibility Work - Zcash still needs to solve big problems (e.g. scalability). Continue this work. Zcash should also actively explore other forms of consensus. Hierarchical consensus is one form of consensus that might be a good model for interacting with transaction aggregation but not the only one. We should continue reach out to experts outside Zcash on these issues.

4. [Millions] - Pay for Verification Key - We should be able to approve transactions with ZKPs other then simply proving we hold a key. Maybe there are other sets of on/off-chain rules that users want to use to approve transactions. Think off-chain smart contracts.

5. [Millions] - Proof Of Stake - Energy efficiency is important for future adoption as is the ability to stake.

6. [100,000s] - Browser Extensions - Browser extension wallets, apps, explorers. This is a re-mention of the browser parts in (1). Make sure no matter where people are on the web their browser allows them to interact with Zcash.

7. [Millions] - Media/Education - Continue investing in education and media. If we want people to care about privacy and what we stand for in the Zcash community we need to broadcast it to the world.

8. [Millions] - Zcash Prosperity Fund - We can keep version 1 simple but I believe the ZPF can be a core part of Zcash’s infrastructure and governance into the future.

9. [100,000s] - Claims and Attestations - The Zcash memo field has to potential to provide core infrastructure for apps and services using it for sharing data. Unfortunately other then for text messages we barely use it. Zcash needs to decide on some standards for this type of communications (CBOR/CWTs?). We should also reach out to other teams that work on attestations as their day job (e.g. ZKPass).

10. [Millions] Improved Regulatory Clarity - Users will expect clearer regulations that provide a better framework for usage and investment.

---

All these items individually could be delivered to users in under 4 years. The amount we can do in parallel is dependant on our ability to fund. Keep in mind there are pools of money besides the dev fund that can be used for these things (e.g. https://ff-ecc-grants.org/). What are everyone’s thoughts on these priorities?

[pkr]

@joshs

I keep hearing that Synthetix governance model is working well - separating decision making and funding decisions by functional area. I don’t have any direct experience but it looks intriguing.

As a VP of growth I would think it would be in your job description to actually use other products and garner the feedback yourself.

[dismad]

@joris

Elon Musk fired 90% of the Twitter staff and made Twitter cheaper to run, and better for the end users

Sidebar here, but I disagree with the notion that Elon Musk made twitter better for the end users. Yikes. I’m about ready to delete my account, full stop.