Hi everyone. Here are a few ECC updates from this week.
Zeboot: ECC is getting together in Palm Springs the week of January 29th, a long with a few of you who are actively contributing and building with Zcash, with the first and last days (29th and 1st) being reserved for the ECC team only. The agenda is now available here. As ECC refocuses on products to drive user adoption, our first open day will be spent on what users want (first principles, not necessarily Zcash), what they are using, then the potential Zcash functional stack and opportunities for focus. The second day will be dedicated to protocol R&D as well as conversations about paying down or eliminating the “technical debt” that slows us down today. My objective for the week is to come away with enough clarity and consensus to define ECC’s roadmap. Please note: If you are non ECC, in order to attend you must have filled out an application and been approved. We are already close to maxed out.
Zashi wallet: Development is progressing well on Zashi but the beta testers have been experiencing challenges with sync times and the ability to spend quickly due to a lag in the available balance. We changed our focus to work on these two things along with Android feature parity and will come back to adding Orchard support afterword. Some addition detail:
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Sync on iOS is 50%+ slower than Android due to some unknown issue. We are seeing a lot of GRPC errors. Lukas is focusing his time on troubleshooting this issue. We are also going to look at adaptive batch sizing to improve performance.
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The issue with the “Available Balance” lag is due to the time it takes to scan the latest subtree. We’ll work to reduce that scan time.
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We’ll then come back to finish up Orchard and ZIP 317.
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We’ve identified that the PR review process is bottlenecked and will be working on mechanisms to improve our process and velocity.
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As of today, a Feb ship date of 1.0 is very possible, but not guaranteed. What is built into the wallet next will be determined by our roadmap.
Community things:
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I met with the Brave team and got a demo of the work completed so far to integrate Zcash intro their browser wallet. It’s exciting. They expect to have beta software available (support for unshielded only) to a group that includes ~50k DAUs sometime in February. They’ll make it available to Zcash community members as well.
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We are very aware of the Binance situation and have been doing what we can to support @aquietinvestor efforts with them, @nuttycom in particular but @daira is leaning in as well.
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I met with DCG. We’ve had check-ins fairly consistently for years. They remain steadfast supporters of the project and we discussed a couple ways in which they might be positioned to help both ECC and the project. One is looking into the viabtc hash rate issue. It’s a nice reminder that some of our biggest supporters, through thick and thin, are still some of our biggest supporters.
R&D:
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The TFL DAG has been updated to include hybrid PoS/PoW on the timeline. The team continued its R&D work and prototyping and will be ready to present and discuss at ECC Zeboot.
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Also ZIP 316 introduced here.
Other:
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We in the midst of budget and forecasting. I built a new tool last week and finishing that up. Part of that is that I’m looking hard at our financial options for other assets on our balance sheet including non-ZEC asset sales over some period of time and yield generation for an additional revenue stream.
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@zakimun gave me a demo of Calculated.fi as it may be a tool we’ll use. It’s tied to Cosmos/Osmosis, so no Zcash right now, but it’s pretty cool if you are playing in that ecosystem.
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We have a critical need for a Director of Operations and Finance. My hair is on fire! We’ll publish the opening next week.
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We’ll also post an opening for a product CTO next week. We’re just wrapping up the description.
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Oh, and we also need to find an experienced product / project manager for the Zashi team. I know those are two different things but I’d like to find someone that is flexible that way. If that’s you and you’re interested, dm me.
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icymi, @squirrel pulled together an awesome summary of the Arborist call this week.
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Oh, and I came across this cool Frost-based hardware. Very interesting!
Happy weekend, everyone.