Hi Zeeps,
A friend recently introduced me to Mono, a Japanese post-rock band. Emotional. Beautiful. Relentless. Soaring. Building. Upwards. Onwards. I’m listening to this track as I write this. It’s the perfect soundtrack for me today, especially as it builds into the last 5 min or so.
Join me. Got your headphones on? Here we go!
We’re accelerating… and man if feels good. A few times this week ECCers told me that it feels like we’re really clicking. Everything is coming together. We are aligned, focused, driving hard, and building. We are admittedly teetering at the edge of “too much,” but more determined than ever. I know many of you are as well.
Zashi
The Zashi pre-order hit the Apple Store this week. Sign up here. While Zashi sounds Japanese, and the origami logo hints at that, its name is based on the smallest unit of Zcash, the Zatoshi. Very soon we will be able to say, “Zashi me.” Pretty damn cool. Pretty damn fun.
The vision for Zashi goes well beyond a wallet. If you’ve followed my other posts, you’ll see it’s positioned as the simple and powerful delivery mechanism for the Zcash user experience. Our protocol or backend work will be directly tied to that user experience. Of course, it will remain open source so anyone can build on and extend it further.
For version 1.0, Orchard support is functionally complete. We’re working through testing and remediation. We’re also shoring working through ZIP 320 and ZIP 317 support, while wrapping up all the little details we need to ship.
Auditing of librustzcash is underway. Fingers crossed for no show-stoppers. The iOS 1.0 app is on track for release this month, with Android on track for about 30 days later.
Zcash
There has been some energy and discussion about how quickly we can deprecate zcashd, and whether that can be done before NU6. The short answer is, no. It’s not strictly an engineering limitation, though part of it. zcashd is the primary consensus node for Zcash, and the ecosystem needs the proper tools, support, and time to make a switch. We intend to make that as painless as possible, but it will take time. We’re targeting no later than Q1 2025. As @daira mentioned here, adding major consensus changes is a bad idea. It’ll take considerable time and resources. Time is key. As the primary supporter of that software, we’re more motivated than anyone to shed that Bitcoin baggage as quickly as possible.
Our focus, for now, is on the stack necessary to support Zashi and other wallets in the ecosystem, including Brave. I also spent some time with @_jon at Qedit this week to get aligned on ZSAs, options, and the timetable. He and that team have been great to work with and I’m excited about what they’re pulling together.
Partnerships
Speaking of Brave, they are moving fast. I’m impressed with their progress and commitment to making Zcash a first-class and useful citizen in their browser. More to come! We’re making a few plans.
Oh, and I also recorded a podcast with them this week. It should be out soon.
We met with three potential partners this week, all related to possible payment integration. One is early, one promising but will take some time, and one is absolute 
! As I mentioned when I rolled out our Q1 roadmap, we’re going to remain agile. If we can get this one to go, it’ll alter our near-term priorities.
Community Engagement
Paul provided an update today on the ZAC and our work to engage the community to gather feedback and sentiment for ECC. This is an incredibly important initiative as we move beyond the ad hoc form of sentiment gathering we’ve done in the past.
Our Zeboot summit this year was a smashing success. ECC met for two days with the community to dream, learn, prioritize, and plan. It was incredibly productive. As promised, we are going to do it again—we are currently planning on twice a year. Zcash builders, mark your calendars for the week of July 8th in San Diego, California. We’ll share more as we lock in the details.
Want to know what happened at the last one? Here are a few summaries from @adjychris here, @pacu here and me.
Operations and Finance
We’ve brought in a new controller, Jolene. She’s been ramping up as our current controller sets off into retirement. Jolene is a great addition to our team and is already crypto-savvy.
We’re almost done with tax returns. Yay. There’s that.
We also engaged with Arktouros for regulatory guidance regarding the software we ship. Michael Mosier and Michelle Gitlitz are exceptional and deeply understand the US regulatory landscape. I was first introduced to Mike when he was at FinCEN and have always been impressed with his thoughtfulness and balanced perspective. It just so happens that JW suggested the community speak to Mike regarding ZSAs, which we intend to do.
Next
After the core engineering team completes all the work necessary to ship Zashi, most will take a breather to recharge at cryptography conferences, with family or in nature. They’ve been working extremely long hours throughout the week and on weekends. Even now, I’m seeing Slack messages come in after midnight, their time, on Friday (Saturday).
We’ll then return for internal Q2 planning the week of April 8th. We ditched the old ECC OKR model and will work through a series of collaborative activities to refactor the roadmap and cross-functionally lay out our plans for the months ahead. It’ll be aggressive but balanced and achievable. Market permitting, we will also start adding to our team later in the month.
Thanks for all the love and support everyone.
Another week of pushing forward.
Emotional. Beautiful. Relentless. Soaring. Building. Upwards.
Onwards.
and thank you 
.