Hi Zeeps,
Say my name!
What’s in a name? A lot, though Shakespeare seems to disagree. So what do I know?
But when a thing’s name and its essence connect, it’s magic. Fireworks. You understand it. It just makes sense.
That’s why I love the name Brave, as in the browser. Here’s what they say about themselves:
"The internet is a sea of ads, hackers, and echo chambers. Big Tech makes huge profits off our data and tells us what’s true and what’s not. Brave is fighting back.
Brave is on a mission to protect your privacy online. We make a suite of internet privacy tools—including our browser and search engine—that shield you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff trying to follow you across the web."
They are fighting against powers that exploit us. Brave.
So are we. We’re in the fight and uncompromisingly brave. Bring 'em on!
It’s no surprise that we’re friends.
This week, Brave announced support for transparent Zcash in their wallet. However, this is only phase one; they are now working on adding shielded support and then integrating it with Filecoin.
We’re building the new system. To do it, these partnerships matter. Full stack. We’re also working with them on other partnerships so ZEC can move.
If you don’t know the whole story of where this work got moving, it goes back to when I met Carlos Acevedo some years ago, who was then a school teacher in the S. Bronx teaching his students financial literacy using Zcash. An unsung hero. We paired up to run several workshops called Crypto in Context. A partnership was formed. Carlos soon joined Brave, and he, James Mudgett, and I met up at Consensus a couple of years back in Austin over BBQ. We conspired and hatched a plan. We would bring Zcash to Brave. All of it.
A vital part of this partnership of this is distribution. Brave is spreading worldwide as people get smarter about their privacy. Today, they boast over 70M MAUs (monthly active users). This partnership will allow all their users to securely and privately store and use their wealth using Zcash.
Oh, icymi, we also did a podcast together, which was released this week. If listening to me talk privacy for 30 minutes is your thing, check it out. If you aren’t following him on Twitter, Luke is fire.
What else?
Zashi
You can pre-order the Zashi wallet on the App Store. As of mid-week, we had about 270 pre-orders. Love it.
As of today, our target date for release remains March 28th. However, we did run into a couple of late showstopper bugs. 
The team is working hard to resolve the issues in time, but we’ll need to make a call on Monday morning as to whether that date will stick. We’re committed to releasing a great product and will let you know as soon as possible. The target date for the Android release remains the end of April.
The website is about ready, and the teaser video is super fun. All joy and goodness.
And maybe a little stress.
Zcash
As it turns out, shocker!, I have an opinion on a development fund. The community has submitted a couple of interesting proposals. I have an alternative idea that I plan to post very soon and hope will spur some dialogue. Stay tuned.
Our engineering focus has continued to be Zashi and we’ll return to PoS research soon.
Other things
I caught a nasty head cold. That sucked. I need to fix my poor sleeping habits.
We submitted some ideas for presentations at ZconV and await the foundation’s reply.
If you want to know what’s happening in DC across crypto, you won’t want to miss next week’s PGP event (live-streamed here) in partnership with the Blockchain Association, USC, and Coinbase. Yep, we’ve got good friends in high places.
Our forecasting modeling tool is done! Scott did a massive amount of work to tie it into our accounting system and deal with Bootstrap and ECC accounting complexities. It’s an amazingly powerful tool that will help us better manage our treasury, staffing, and expenses.
As I mentioned before, a couple of our team are attending HACs and Real World Crypto to “recharge.” 
We met with Zondax this week to get an update on Ledger. A bug still needs to be resolved, but it’s closer than ever—maybe a month or two out. We’ll be looking into the timeline for adding hardware support to Zashi.
We also shared our Zashi designs with a potential payments rails provider so they can model a recommended UX for integration. I’m excited to see what they come up with.
I engaged with another hardware wallet provider about a Zcash-specific wallet. They’re early, but I want to explore these options for Zcashers fully.
I met with Reserve, a stablecoin provider, about ZSAs support. Unfortunately, regulatory concerns make this a long shot for the time being.
We’re spinning up an ECC Discord for Zashi and community engagement, coming soon.
ZAC invites have been going out and people are signing up.
We’re looking forward to seeing many of you at Consensus next month. If you are going to be there, stay tuned!
Oh, and speaking of names, We’ve settled on the “Z|ECC Summit” to replace the name Zeboot. Thanks to all the previous Zebooters for your collaboration in resolving this important decision. 
See you in July!
All for this week. A fun one for Zcashers and Brave.
Say my name!
Onward.
I hate being negative in this forum and this message is totally coming across like that.
Me and my big mouth.
There’s never anything to take issue with 
