Gardening Club - June

Ecosystem Updates
1

Hello Zcashers,

The next Zcash Gardening Club is Tuesday, June 2nd at 1 pm EST. In order to allow time for more discussion, we will have 5 slots available for presenters and 30 mins for discussion. We prioritize presenters who signed up last time and didn’t speak yet, then we prioritize new speakers.

The presenters for this week are:

  • Thomas Schmiedel, z-board
  • Prastut Kumar, Zcash Service Status Dashboard
  • Alfredo Garcia, Zcash core developer
  • Brad Miller, Wallet team, ECC
  • 20Birds

All project updates are listed below. If you would like to attend the call on Tuesday, please register here. You can also use that form to sign up to give a project update for next month.

PROJECT UPDATES

z-board, Thomas

  • Link
  • Description: Fully anonymous and untraceable news platform based on the Zcash blockchain.
  • Status: we started working on z-board “2.0” which includes architecture draft and UI draft
  • Community Ask: Happy to meet you

Zcash Service Status Dashboard, Prastut Kumar

  • Link
  • Description: Monitoring and Analytics platform for Zcash.
  • Status: We have a dashboard that does the following:
    • Monitors ZEC volume across 10 exchanges and 2 trading pairs.
    • Monitors healthcheck of various blockchain explorers. Whether they are reporting correct data or not.
    • Monitoring Zcash blockchain metrics.
  • Community Ask: We have the following ideas to further extend the dashboard and hence wanted feedback on whether they are a need of the community and if yes what do we prioritize:
    • Enabling Community Participation: enable Zcash users to create charts that they think are insightful around the data the dashboard is ingesting and sharing with the community as a whole. In technical terms, we want users to sign up on our Grafana dashboard and spinoff their own dashboards!
    • Monitoring Node for Miners: we are inspired by Jameson Lopp’s work on Satoshi whose objective is to protect Bitcoin by bringing transparency to the activity occurring on the node network. By making this data available, Bitcoin developers can learn more about node performance, gain operational insight about the network, and the community can be informed about attacks and aberrant behavior in a timely fashion. We want to extend the dashboard with the same vision by borrowing and modifying Jameson Lopp’s ideas:
    • Building a pool of ZCash SSD nodes that act together in order to monitor a larger portion of the node network and thus provide a more complete picture.
    • Sending alerts to Zcash developers about aberrant behavior on the network, such as changes of more than one standard deviation.
    • Automated quality assurance tests / sanity checks. For example, adding alerts that would fire if the sum of ZEC in existence ever changes by an amount other than the block reward in a single block.
    • Graphing the data collected by ZCash SSD nodes is but one of many possibilities. It could be useful for us to provide batch files of the raw data collected so that other engineers can analyze it, or we could build an API devoted to making it easy to query the data.

Zcash core, Alfredo Garcia

  • Link
  • Description: community requests development in zcashd
  • Status: Milestones 1, 2, 3 and 4
  • Community Ask: More requests/feedback from the broader community.

zECC Mobile Wallet, Brad Miller

  • Link
  • Description: Privacy preserving Android and iOS mobile wallets for shielded Zcash
  • Status: Mobile SDKs open sourced, lightwallet server open sourced and performant, fully functional wallet code being open sourced June 10
  • Community Ask: "Sign up for our upcoming Protect Privacy Hackathon at Gitcoin
  • Start collaborating and opening PRs on the SDK and lightwalletd repositories
  • Check back to our github on June 10 to see the mobile wallet code and build your own Zcash wallet"

20Birds, Anonymous

  • Link
  • Description: NA
  • Status: “Content Package”
  • Community Ask: Help with ideas for future videos. Comment, share, participate with the content.

The Zcash Gardening Club is a monthly meeting to discuss how to make Zcash open source projects grow. Zcash Gardening Club is on the first Tuesday of each month, at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST. The format for the call is round-robin where each presenter has a 5 minute slot to give an update on their project. Anyone is welcome to join, provided you agree to follow our code of conduct.

3 Likes
2

CHAT PREFERENCE

Hi everyone - tomorrow is the June Gardening Club. We wanted to ask the group what your preferences are for chat discussions. Do you prefer discussions on the forum, discord, reddit, somewhere else? Select all the options that apply and please add your thoughts in the comment thread.

  • Forum
  • Discord
  • Github
  • Other

0 voters

1 Like
3

I prefer this one but it seems like Discord, like the zcash chat kind of shrinks your type area and forces you to get to the point a little bit more and that’s the only reason I think that might be better

4

Can I be awkward ? Forum for ‘discussion’, Discord for ‘chat’ :slight_smile:

5

Is this for chatting during the stream or after the stream for follow up questions/answers?

6

@nathan-at-least @nathan would be able to clarify but I believe it is for chatting in between the monthly calls. For example, if Project A presents an idea and people want to follow up with that project, where should those conversations be?

7

The goal is to give an answer to anyone who says “Oh, wow, awesome project! I want to ask / help / follow them. Where can I find them?”