Dear Zcash community,
We are excited to share that we have concluded the milestone on ZSA Protocol Specifications!
This is the fruit of working with the skilled devs from ECC and ZF, resulting in comments, iterations, joint discussions, fixes and re-implementations of key insights.
We have now opened new pull requests for the ZIPs of the Transfer and Issuance Mechanisms that include specification details, the PR can be found here: ZIPs 226 & 227 - ZSA Protocol: Transfer, Issuance and Burn by PaulLaux · Pull Request #680 · zcash/zips · GitHub
With this update, we are submitting the material corresponding to milestone #7 of the ZSA proposal and grant - ZSA Protocol Specification (previously called milestone 5).
Some of the results of these discussions with ECC and ZF are:
- We have discussed and addressed comments made in the earlier pull requests (viz. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/649 and https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/628) and brought the documents even more in line with the structure and language of other Zcash Improvement Proposals.
- We have separated out the rationale for our choices from the exact changes we propose, with a view to making it simpler for implementers and reviewers to read what has changed in the specification.
- We have also added even more references to the protocol specification sections and ZIPs where it would help connect our ZIPs with the existing background material.
- We have also made certain changes that help make ZSAs easier to use going forward, even if there is a move to a new (post-Orchard) anonymity pool. The most significant of those are:
- The key structure for Issuance is now constructed in line with (but independent of) the Orchard and Sapling key structures in ZIP 32.
- The asset identifiers are now independent of the protocol, and we have a separate step that converts the identifier into a format relevant for each protocol.
We look forward to hearing your comments on these proposals on this pull request!
Best,
The ZSA Team