Future of Zcash

[joshs]

@earthrise

So, to replicate that success in Zcash, I think we’d need equally good tooling and docs. We don’t yet have good tooling, libraries, and docs for the protocol features Zcash already supports, so I’d recommend starting there—make it really fun to build stuff on the current protocol. Then we can spin up a feedback loop between Zcash-user devs and Zcash’s protocol developers, and feature requests like performance improvements and DeFi will emerge naturally out of that feedback.

Protocol upgrades are really costly (there are only a handful of people in the world with the skills to do it), so the tighter we can make that feedback loop between Zcash-user-devs and Zcash-protocol-devs, the more cost-effective our core protocol upgrades will be.

This resonates. We ran a hackathon with Gitcoin in 2020 but were challenged to find many participants because of the difficulty and deficiencies highlighted here. Good tooling and docs would be a good step forward, and it’s one of the reasons we’re continuing to focus on delivering world-class SDKs.