After working on Zecwallet for over 4 years, I have decided to step back from Zecwallet and move on to some different projects. It’s been a fun 4 years, building various Zecwallet projects!
I’ve been trying to get another team to take over Zecwallet, but haven’t had much luck so far.
If nobody else takes over Zecwallet, it will be deprecated over the next 6 months, to give existing users the chance to move to a new wallet.
There might also be a licensing issue - Since Orchard is BOSL license, it seems that I would need to change Zecwallet license too if I want to support Orchard transactions (Since I’ll need to compile in the Orchard create into Zecwallet Lite). I reached out to ECC late last week to ask whether I would need to change the license but we haven’t resolved this yet.
As for NU5 and Zecwallet:
Zecwallet will continue to sync
Users will be able to send and receive transactions to and from t-addresses
Users will be able to send and receive transactions to and from sapling z-addresses
What won’t be supported:
Sending funds TO an orchard address
The wallet will not show an Orchard or Unified address, so users can’t receive funds into their Orchard pool.
(One quick disclaimer: Zecwallet has been recently having performance issues with zcashd v5.0.0 and LightwalletD, so we can hopefully get these resolved before NU5 activates)
I want to thank the Zcash community for the enormous support and help over the last 4 years, and especially thank the Zcash Foundation and ECC for being so supportive of Zecwallet.
@adityapk00 On behalf of the Zcash community, I want to thank you for your efforts over the past four years. Zecwallet has been a key part of the Zcash user experience, and your departure is a real loss for the Zcash ecosystem.
Pending resolution of the lack of clarity around Orchard licensing, the Zcash Foundation hopes to able to issue an RFP for third parties to take over the maintenance and upgrade of Zecwallet Lite software stack, and work with the Zebra and Zondax teams to integrate support for Zebra as an alternative node back-end, and support for Sapling transactions using the Ledger hardware wallet.
Thanks for the update and for your years of hard work. Zecwallet has been a huge part of building ZEC to where it is today. I’m sad to see you go, but excited to see what you get up to next.
Zecwallet is special to me, personally as well. Your speedy developments and responsive support were a major inspiration to me over the past years, and I sincerely doubt I’d be where I am today without that inspiration. Huge thanks and best of luck!
As it stands, to get around the BOSL-encumbered code would require non-trivial refactorings or re-writing of code to keep ZecWallet working as it currently is upon NU5 activation, even if it doesn’t support sending or receiving Orchard shielded transactions.
Thank you so much for your contributions! ZecWallet is IMHO the best zcash wallet out there. So much faster and more functional than the 2-3 others I’ve tried. I’d hate to see it archived.
I also love zcash, and would love to learn rust with something real. I am a strong programmer with quite an OSS track record, and I don’t balk at cryptography. But I am not deeply versed in the nitty-gritty of blockchain consensus or payment protocols. I’d have a lot to learn. But I wonder if during your 6 months to retirement if perhaps we could work together so I could ramp up on the codebase so we could keep it going.
I’d definitely want to work toward full NU5 support including UA/Orchard address support. And eventually, I hope to integrate cryptocurrencies support into my MoneyMan software, so this may be a good way for me to learn the ropes.
TL;DR some hackers are intent on rolling out a variant (or better continuation!) of zecwallet that has a simple opt-out contribution-for-service based funding model.
Hey folks… a few of us have been working on the zecwallet code… fixing stale dependencies, cleaning up the UI, setting up CI infrastructure etc. We had hoped to be further along before announcing ourselves widely, but this conversation shows that we need to say something now.
We’re mostly done with a POC fork of zecwallet.
We would be very eager to collaborate with, support, and integrate with other efforts!
Our thesis is that the resulting app is economically sustainable, since it incorporates opt-in micropayments to the dev-and-infra teams who hold a multi-sig wallet intended to support the project.
We believe that past projects have benefited from an abundance of technical prowess and suffered from misaligned incentives.
This experiment was catalyzed around this thread:
If we are successful we’ll refer to ourselves as a DAO, because our funds will be held by our developers/participants in a k-of-n threshold commitment scheme. We think that this is sufficient structure to warrant the name.
Thank you @adityapk00 . It has been the best app wallet I have used so far. However I really do wish we had a team around this. I am sure more teams can use what you know and learned from the development of ZecWallet Lite. @zancas thank you taking on the work on this front. I would love to be an early user and hope to hear more from this.
Can anyone in here shed some light on how the forthcoming ECC wallet product might be able to leverage the existing product built by the ZecWallet team?
It would be sad to have all of this ZecWallet technology and human hours abandoned/ The ECC wallet wind up as a build from ground zero project
I too am interested in this, I posted in another thread but think it belongs here better:
I didn’t realize the ECC had a wallet team. Are they working on a desktop GUI wallet? With the end of zecwallet and zecwalle lite, there is no desktop GUI wallet anymore, only the full node command line option zcashd. And it is a shame that we have such a major release coming on the 31st, and there will be such a barrier to adoption for most people since there is no GUI wallet for desktop.
@zancas has mentioned he and others are working on a desktop GUI wallet based off zecwallet, but I am curious what the ECC wallet team is planning?
For the ECC wallet, we don’t intend to leverage the ZecWallet codebase. We are building our own. We have discussed the possibility of the desktop wallet but are currently focused on iOS and Android.
I think that a good desktop GUI wallet is equally or even more important than IOS/Android wallets - my personal opinion only but I have seen this echoed by a number of others on Twitter, Telegram and the forum.
Having a good ECC developed/maintained GUI that can be used with Ledger/Trezor would be a big win IMO
Looking forward to the ECC focus on user adoption either way though!!
May I ask why you are focusing on mobile wallets over desktop wallets? My opinion is that desktop wallets are more important, especially since we do not currently have any desktop wallets, and we have mobile wallets already.
the mobile wallets are mostly based on SDKs released by ECC. So, ECC is not changing their priority but actually improving on those efforts. Why mobile and not desktop? There are a lot of internet users who only has access to mobile phones. You might be surprised that consumer laptop or PC is too expensive for half of the global population. Also, any improvement made to mobile wallets, will be useful for desktop wallets.
It just seems really short sighted to me to have a major release coming on the 31st and having no desktop wallets.
And those people you’re referring to already have mobile wallets to choose from.
If we want to increase onboarding to Zcash, I strongly think we’d get more people if we filled the hole of having no desktop wallet, instead of improving mobile wallets that we already have. Not saying we shouldn’t improve mobile wallets. But if we have to choose between improving an option we have, vs making the first desktop wallet when we have none, the better choice seems pretty apparent to me.
I am not in favor of an ECC wallet, because I am concerned about the centralization of the community’s technical resources into the ECC node.
I frequently hear people advocating for a more diverse decentralized expansive community.
I am firmly in that camp.
Moving more functionality/responsbility/vulnerability into an established zcash institution WHEN IT COULD BE BUILT ELSEWHERE is an anti-pattern.
This used to be the ECC’s stance as well. They shouldn’t change their strategy. Wallet development is something that can, and should be done elsewhere.
POS protocol upgrades should be the focus of ECC effort.
This sentiment, BTW seems to be reflected elsewhere.
Huge thanks and best of luck!