Hi Zeeps,
Everything Everywhere All At Once is exactly how April 2nd felt in the Zcash universe. Dear lord.
On that day:
@ebfull released his paper describing Project Tachyon. This a big deal! Allowing Zcash to scale through Orchard proof aggregation and oblivious syncing. ECC will embrace this work and, at least, contribute to research and development on out-of-band payments.
Brave released v1 support for shielded ZEC in partnership with ECC and the Filecoin Foundation. This is a big deal! Brave is not just another wallet; it’s browser-based. Creating zkps through a browser has long been a dream. This not only unlocks the use of shielded ZEC for payments across the web, but Brave is running Zcash ads to their 85 million monthly active users as part of our partnership agreement.
Shielded Labs released its updated roadmap for Crosslink. It’s aggressive; they are progressing greatly, and I love it. This is a big deal! Hybrid PoW/PoS will unlock yield generation, decentralize mining, provide finality guarantees, improve interoperability, and improve coinholder participation in governance and funding decisions.
If you haven’t seen the movie on which this post’s theme is based, it’s an absurd comedy that delves into the tensions between the reality we experience and the infinite possibilities that manifest in adjacent universes. Many realities might exist, but the one we experience reflects the choices we’ve made in this one. Our universe is not deterministic; it’s what we’ve collectively decided. We can choose nihilism, or we can build our path to freedom.
Our path to unlocking so much at one time is not accidental. We have made a series of small decisions resulting in big unlocks. As in the film, our current reality has come in three parts:
Part 1. Confront the brutal facts.
A number of people in the community stepped back and questioned if what we were doing was working. We recognized a few things:
- The price of Zcash had been trending in the wrong direction, which had a symbiotic relationship with sentiment.
- We lost users due to a myriad of things, including the introduction of ASICs, lack of yield-generating opportunities, and the sandblasting attack.
- The zcashd codebase, and the wallet specifically, has been weighing us down. The complexity of maintaining and upgrading it was costing us too much time and effort.
- The user experience was insufficient for “normie” users, limiting our growth. The available wallets were inadequate for driving new adoption, and sync time was a killer.
- The shielded pool growth stalled, indicating that new users were not coming in or without tools they felt comfortable using to shield their Zcash. Ledger and Trezor were possible answers neither delivered.
- Governance was tightly controlled by ECC and ZF, both of whom also received guaranteed funding from emissions.
- There was too much closed-door, top-down decision-making.
- We don’t scale. Even if we had all these things, growth is inherently limited.
Confronting the brutal facts is something we do all the time at ECC. It’s a loop we must repeat: observe, address, test, question, refactor. It’s good for us, it’s good for the community.
Part 2. Embrace hope and optimism, reject nihilism, and act on it.
I don’t think I’m too off by staying many had started to lose hope. But many embraced the brutal facts and picked a different path. Some things have been in the works for a while; some are more recent.
- We moved away from the corrosive assertion that the price of ZEC doesn’t matter.
- Crosslink moved from an R&D effort at ECC to a full-throttle push at Shielded Labs.
- The Zcash Foundation, ECC, Zingo!, and @Pacu have gotten us on a path to full zcashd deprecation.
- ECC released Zashi, a world-class UX for ZEC. Zingo! is rapidly experimenting with new and interesting ideas.
- The Zashi team worked with Keystone (supported by a ZCG grant) to launch the first Zcash-shielded hardware wallet.
- ECC rejected direct funding and killed the trademark agreement with the Zcash Foundation, fundamentally shifting power and governance while increasing accountability for outcomes.
- Everyone has communicated updates openly and transparently, with more cooperation and coordination than ever before.
- Thanks to the work done on Orchard and Sean’s research, we have a path to scalability.
There are universes where Zcash stagnates or implodes, but not this one.
Part 3. All at Once.
The community is now on fire.
- The April 2nd announcements are big!
- We’re in the midst of governance and funding discussions that have the potential to empower coin-holder voice.
- zcashd deprecation and embrace of the Zcash Foundation’s zebras, with Zingo!’s Zaino and ECC’s Zallet wallet, is accelerating our path to deliver more, faster.
- The path to ZSAs is clear.
- Four organizations are now doing core protocol work (ECC, Qedit, Shielded Labs, and the Zcash Foundation).
- Zashi v2 will soon launch, with DEX integration to follow, thanks to NEAR and Maya.
- ECC is doing critical work on post-quantum cryptography.
- Community efforts worldwide (Brazil, @hanh, Least Authority, Nigeria, @pacu, Spanish, ZecHub, and others) are executing and delivering real value and growth.
- Activity on socials is growing and growing very positively.
- The shield pool is experiencing exponential growth with almost daily ATHs!
- I can say with full confidence that large players are noticing with new or renewed interest.
Yeah, get those shields up Zeeps! We’re kicking ass.
“The universe is so much bigger than you realize.”
We’re just getting rolling. And it’s in this universe that this is happening.
There is no stopping us because “We can do whatever we want.”
But I also want to leave you with this quote from the film: “The Only Thing I Do Know Is That We Have To Be Kind. Please, Be Kind. Especially When We Don’t Know What’s Going On.”
How we treat each other matters. We have SO MUCH more to do. Challenge one another. But be kind to one another through the journey. Cool?
Here’s this week’s work from ECC’s in the Zcash universe:
Q2 Planning Week.
We planned for Q2 this week. Some prep work was needed, but we minimized the meetings to allow everyone to stay focused on the tasks at hand.
We spent two hours on Q1 self-assessments, spending time on each functional area: strategy, finance and operations, Zcash core, Zashi, product marketing, and marketing and comms.
The next day we spent 90 minutes on Q2 roadmap refactoring and plans for marketing and comms.
It was highly engaging, positive, and left me excited for the months ahead. We’ll publish the updated roadmap this coming week.
Zashi
Zashi Design
- Made progress on final App Redesign for: Wallet Status Widget, Cross-chain payments for Maya/Near
- Made a bunch of ad hoc product and engineering-requested edits
- Made improvements to Receive ZEC designs (support address rotation + multi-account)
Q&A and Dev Support
- Testing & QA
- Tracking issues for the devs in GitHub
- User Support queries & Discord
- Socials Management
- Community Engagement
Zashi iOS
Released SDK 2.2.10
Released Zashi 1.5
Zash 2.0
Restore Wallet redesigned:
- MnemonicSwift 2.0.5 released with access to the BIP39 dictionary
- Set the seed words with suggestions
- Set the birthday manually
- SDK support for estimation of the height based on a given date
- Adopted SDK with estimation for the birthday
Create Wallet flow refactored:
- Land a user immediately to the Home Screen
- Handle existing DB on the root onboarding screen
Wallet Status Widget component for the Home screen:
- Implemented the business logic
- UI is in progress
Analytics Update:
Unique Installs: 7.18k
Total Downloads: 8.57k
AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- Released multiple Zashi versions v1.5-1.5.2 (Zcash SDK releases v2.2.9-2.2.11)
- Reviewed, improved, and finally merged a huge Restore flow redesign PR
- Found a bug and cooperated on a Flexa fix (SDK release v1.0.12)
- Started to work on the new estimate-wallet-birthday-from-date SDK API
- Wallet Status Widget component for the Home screen: UI implemented, bottom sheet UI implemented (with navigation flows)
- Hotfix: automatic keyboard handling during navigation
- Hotfix: automatic bottom sheet handling during navigation
- Refactor: bottom sheets made much more reusable without code duplication
- Refactor: various UI elements made much more reusable and extensible without code duplication
Analytics Update:
Total Install Base: 3.76k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 16.9k
PlayStore Rating: 4.434*
Zcash Core
- Wrote a proposal for changes to note encryption that can be included in NU7 to provide post-quantum resilience for note spendability. This is a small change to the protocol that will provide a mechanism for notes to be made post-quantum unforgeable, which will provide a defense for if a quantum adversary comes into existence before the chain has time to move to a postquantum-safe proving system. It will be implemented by wallets and will affect the issuance of new notes; @Daira-Emma (ze/hir) is working on a proposal to present to the community next week.
- Released zcash_transparent 0.2.2 and zcash_client_sqlite 0.16.2 to fix issues in transparent wallet recovery.
- Updated zcash-devtool and zallet to the latest crate stacks & did other dependency upgrade work, and in the process made contributions to zaino and zebrad.
- Work on Zingo and Zewif integration is ongoing. We are actively upstreaming contributions to both as friction points appear in integration.
Other
@peacemonger’s designed a killer advert for Brave.
I participated in Monday’s with Maya.
@paulbrigner had a big week in DC:
- Attended (and assisted with the event production) of the District of Columbia Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking (DISB) Office of Innovation’s event on ‘Celebrating Women Shaping the Future of FinTech and Digital Asset Policy.
- Attended the Decentralization Research Center’s 2025 Decentralized Tech Summit, which was a special opportunity to discuss policy issues with a very special group of attendees and speakers and an outstanding agenda.
- Participated in the Blockchain Association’s Use Case Fly-In on Capitol Hill. Met with (all photos): Rep. Davidson (Ohio)Rep. Bynum (Oregon)Rep. Gray’s staff (California)Rep. Baumgartner (Washington)Rep. Goldman (Texas)
- Attended the American Innovation Project (a Blockchain Association Initiative) & Digital Currency Group Dinner with Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA-10) and a number of Capitol Hill staffers with a small group of industry leaders.
We’ve implemented Gusto for better employee and operational efficiency.
Our latest transparency report was completed and will be posted this coming week.
I participated in an Agoric board meeting on behalf of Bootstrap.
Don’t forget to review and weigh in on the governance-related ZIPs. Polling will begin April 17th.
2.77M+ in the shielded pool!
That’s all for this week.
Building reality,
Onward.
