Hi Zeeps,
It’s v1 roadmap week!
To be agile and unstoppable is to flow. Whatever comes, we must move with it. We adapt, curling around and over obstacles, flowing with increasing momentum and purpose.
“Be water my friend”
To realize a new system, we must be like that, we must be water.
This new system will be user-friendly, widely available, shielded-only with optional disclosure. Its supporting infrastructure will be distributed, censorship-resistant and robust. Using Zcash, it will allow people everywhere to store and use ZEC without dependence on legacy choke-points and third party limitations. Yes, we want to be able to use ZEC within the old system where we can, but we also need Zcash to stand on its own. And just like us, the token must be unleashed to flow.
This is ECC’s current roadmap. Let me share my thinking and approach.
ECC Roadmap Q1 2024.pdf (61.0 KB)
Approach
The structure of the roadmap is based on agility, flexibility and speed. It’s designed to focus on user needs, what we learn, what others in the ecosystem do, and regulatory limitations we might face. We will move quickly, and strike where there is opportunity.
It is directional rather than fixed, flowing quarter to quarter, adapting as we go. The ECC team will update and clarify the roadmap once per quarter along with goals and timelines. Twice a year, we plan to invite Zcash community developers into our planning as we did with Zeboot.
The roadmap includes dependencies and assumptions. For example, we’ll explore DEX integration as we get closer to Maya support for Zcash.
We will ship quickly, get things out into the open, listen to user feedback and continue to build momentum. We welcome your participation. If you have skills that can help us, we’d love to work with you. We’ll also build things around your work in the community, incorporating the contributions of others.
Specifics
The Official ECC Zashi Wallet
We currently plan to push major releases semi-annually, with minor releases in between. Major releases will include new capabilities, with minor releases delivering fixes and incremental improvements. Market and user research will be used to focus and prioritize our efforts.
The schedule includes candidates for research in the “User and Market Research…” row and we will prioritize building based on what we learn about potential impact for user adoption against cost and complexity. Our initial target users are the “100” existing Zcash power users, who want to make use of their tokens and onboard others. They want to see the token move and we want to enable them to give the token life through their actions.
For the remainder of this quarter, we will focus engineering efforts on the Zashi 1.0 releases and begin planning for 1.1 improvements. We will also begin focused work on messaging and liberated payments, which would allow users to send ZEC to someone within a message. This will flow into the other Q2 potential areas shown in the roadmap. As of now, these other areas are candidates, not commitments.
Zcash Protocol
Our core protocol work is intended to support the capabilities surfaced through Zashi. The user and market research will drive our protocol-focused priorities.
We will continue to devote significant time to research and design of a hybrid consensus design(i.e. PoW/PoS). However, we are resource constrained and I want to ensure that we also spend significant cycles on capabilities that we can deliver in shorter periods of time. We must multithread our efforts.
As such, the specific timeline for PoS/PoW will be elastic. If we can move faster, we will. If we get help from others, we can move faster. If we have the money, and there is talent available to hire, we will hire and accelerate further. We’re happy to work with the experts in the community if they would like to participate in our protocol related efforts, which may speed up our timeline.
I hope you are excited and motivated by all the possibilities we have in front of us!
A few other things we’ve been working on this week:
ETHDenver
I was at ETHDenver most of the week, and I’m barely standing after days of meetings and late nights, or were those early mornings. A few chunks of time spent:
Scheming with the Brave team on use cases we can unlock for shielded users of the Brave wallet
Getting perspective and sharing our plans with the Grayscale team
Talking to a couple teams about potential partnerships and addressing concerns
Meeting with a couple potential financial partners
Catching up with old friends and ECCers including a mini Zeboot reunion of sorts with a number of folks that were in town
It was so good to see so many friends throughout the week!
Zashi
@str4d @nuttycom @Lukas @Honza all continue to crank!
Thanks to @earthrise, the iOS portion of the security audit was completed with a few things to address but no show stoppers.
Work included Orchard support, ZIP 317 implementation, and we remain on track to release the iOS wallet later this month.
Android Beta version 0.2.0 was released that includes periodic background sync and an updated UI. We are currently on track to release the Android 1.0 wallet late April.
Andrea also got us up on a new product management tool and set up the process for how we’ll manage the entire product lifecycle.
Community Engagement
We began a process to more actively engage the community to gauge sentiment on key decisions and issues. Look for more on that from @paulbrigner next week!
ECC Brand and Website
@adjychris and @zeneo are currently updating the ECC brand and website to better reflect the new ECC, as well as content for Zashi. It’s looking badass fitting. Look for that to come out along with the Zashi iOS release. The team also plans to give you a much prettier version of the roadmap, updated once a quarter.
Finances
We’re still working through models and ideas for improved and streamlined financial and treasury management. As I mentioned in a prior post, we have a number of assets but have limitations due to liquidity and lock ups. All in all, I’m feeling pretty good about where we sit. That said, the current dev fund uncertainty makes some of this challenging.
You + Us
Those of us at Zeboot agreed that we need to do it again! I don’t yet have a name for the next one, but we’re tentatively looking at options for July to coincide with our Q3 planning. Man, that seems like such a long time from now. But I think it works well with all the other things going on.
Feeling the flow yet? Yeah, me too.
Onward.
. Don’t lose focus and keep building!
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