ECC Wallet Team Questions

General
1

I have recently learned there is an ECC wallet team working on making mobile wallets.

We already have mobile wallets compatible with Orchard and UAs: Edge (android only), Nighthawk, and Unstoppable. Zecwallet Lite (mobile) will not support these upgrades, but will still function for 6 months from now with the sapling pool before being deprecated.

The only desktop GUI wallets we have is Zecwallet Lite and the Zecwallet full node option, both of which will not support the new upgrades, and will be deprecated in six months.

ECC has a command line, full node, desktop wallet called zcashd, but it is only available for linux distros, not windows or mac. It will work with Orchard and UAs.

I’m obviously not a dev or team member, but as a very new member to the zcash community, it seems like desktop wallet options are seriously lacking for people like me that are trying to onboard. This could have the unintended effect of turning people off the project.

If someone wants a desktop wallet that will work with the new upgrades, their only option is zcashd on linux only.

There is no desktop command line, full node option for windows or mac.

There is no desktop GUI, full node wallet for ANY os.

There is no desktop GUI, light client for ANY os.

We have mobile wallet options already, shouldn’t the ECC wallet team be focusing on the lack of desktop wallets instead?

I feel like that would be a much greater priority. There is a community led team working on a desktop GUI wallet that is a light client (to my knowledge they are not working on a full node option).

But even considering that work that is in progress, we have no options for desktop wallets and three options for mobile wallets, so why make more of those right now?

In addition, the number of nodes on the network is vital to the security of the project, so only having a command line, full node option for linux and not windows or mac could lower the number of people running full nodes. So this option seems especially vital. More people would run full nodes if the command line option was available on all operating systems. And many more people would run a full node if there was a GUI option at all.

What do people think?

2

I’m not with ECC, just want to comment on some of the things I know.

All three wallets you listed were based on ECC wallet SDK. What ECC is doing right now is making sure all three wallets can support the NU5 and the Halo Arc. So, if ECC doesn’t develop the mobile wallet SDK right now, the three mobile wallets you mentioned will likely not support NU5 or UA.

There’s always the option to run zcashd on Docker, which both Windows and MacOS support.

While I share the sentiment that desktop wallets are useful, supporting desktop apps take a lot of engineering resources. Also, as mobile hardware are more resource-constrained than desktop hardware, any advance made on mobile wallet performance can be adapted to desktop wallets.

TLDR: If you want Edge, Nighthawk, and Unstoppable to keep supporting Zcash with NU5 and UA, then you want ECC to focus on mobile wallet.

3

(WSL is in Win10 and up and runs Zcashd on their Ubuntu flavor)

4

I think Edge, Nighthawk, and Unstoppable already support NU5, they are listed on halo.electriccoin.co and it says wallets listed “Indicates support for Shielded by Default and/or Unified Addresses at NU5 activation”.

Whereas ZecWallet is not listed because it is not supporting Orchard/UAs.

My understanding is that ECC is making an “official” mobile wallet, not helping the current mobile wallets have compatibility with NU5, but I could be misunderstanding.

5

Yes, ECC is developing their own mobile wallet based on their wallet SDK.
Yes, all the wallets mentioned depend on ECC to upgrade their wallet SDK if they want to support NU5.
Yes, you misunderstand the situation.

Do you want ECC to abandon their mobile wallet effort and focus on desktop wallet? If so, this would mean the mobile wallets you listed, will not support NU5 as they use ECC mobile wallet SDK.

TLDR: All the mobile wallets you mentioned will not support NU5 unless ECC upgrade their mobile wallet SDK. cmiiw

Anyway, I strongly support current ECC strategy in focusing on bringing the best mobile wallet experience to ZEC users.

3 Likes
6

Okay thanks for explaining, I didn’t realize those mobile wallets relied on the ECC wallet team’s mobile wallet focus, I thought they were already ready for NU5.

That makes the decision on desktop vs mobile development less of an easy decision.

Hopefully eventually we will have both

2 Likes
7

Why cant we have both? Cant ECC focus on two things at once? If ECC needs to do everything they should hire more devs.

8

I mean I guess that would be ideal! But currently they are focusing on mobile only, so it seems they are doing only one, and I was asking why not choose desktop instead of mobile.

It would be nice to hear from someone on the team itself for their thoughts

9

Have there been any updates from ECC in regards to this wallet?

ECC releasing an official wallet in iOS / Android store would be awesome. We need a clean and well put together wallet that new folks can use.

Some wallets now have 3 different addresses : Unified , Z address and T addresses. For a new user this can look very confusing. There is 0 info in any zcash wallet today explaining the differences between these addresses. A new user who downloads one of these wallets and sees this will have no idea where to send what. I hope the ECC wallet is designed with new users in mind and also made to show in multiple languages.

10

While not a wallet, ZecHub does have an article to help explain this education gap:

Please check out or wiki for more information on other topics as well. If there is more information needed let us know either via PR or you can DM here on the site.

2 Likes
11

The first and highest priority for our team is the completion of the SDK updates to enable both an improved sync along with Spend Before Sync capability, designed to work together in providing a much improved user experience with light clients.

In regards to the ECC wallet, we will be releasing a minimalist-type wallet in the next few weeks. This was a shift from months back and focuses efforts on a few key concepts:

  1. We have a platform to test and demonstrate new features (e.g. Spend Before Sync, scan/decrypt parallelization, etc.).
  2. We have a wallet that provides a simple, straightforward user interface. There’s not a lot of screens, everything is black and white, high contrast, limited buttons. The idea is “it just works”. The idea here isn’t to say ours is better than any others, but instead that we are providing something different. If you don’t want a bunch of bells and whistles and instead just want a basic app (similar to having a physical leather wallet that you might buy at a store to hold your paper cash) then this will be that app.
  3. Provide a reference codebase that others can use to build on as they wish. Some have mentioned Nighthawk leveraging parts of our codebase.

All of this predicates on having a solid SDK. The wallet component is a much smaller piece to this puzzle. We currently have two contractors supporting both our SDK and the wallet.

Regarding the addresses, our wallet does support UAs and shows that address in the UI. You can drill down via a small icon to see the individual component addresses, but it’s not featured prominently. As far as instructions/documentation, again, the UI is minimalist. Documentation will be available via web links to support any user that needs additional information.

The use case for this wallet is you run into someone and want to send them ZEC. They don’t have a wallet. With this, they should be able to get onboarded and able to receive ZEC quickly with a simple interface that you can give them a few quick pointers on and they are functional.

Some of this is a bit of a vision, but one of the issues that I’ve read in this forum, on social media and in talking with people in various places is the level of complexity to get up to speed in using ZEC. I’m hoping we can start to break down that barrier to adoption.

4 Likes