Important: Potential Binance Delisting

[noamchom]

@dontpanicburns

Im trying to understand your logic

My logic is that Zcash can’t exist without the regular support from ZF, ECC, ZCG

And so it follows that they’ve got to have a reliable source of funding their operations (currently this is done by liquidating their free ZEC coins).

An unplanned delisting of ZEC from Binance, and the implied risk of delisting by other industry leading CEXes, would cause severe damage to the spot value of ZEC, and would dry up buy-side liquidity even worse than it already is.

The Big 3 would be forced to liquidate even more of their ZEC into increasingly less liquidity.

The end result would be potentially irreparable damage to the Zcash brand, and the Zcash ZEC markets, and by extension it would halt growth, it would hurt users and investors today, and all of the rest of the obvious implications.

Would ASIC miners continue to run their machines, and dump their ZEC rewards into BTC? Sure.

Would people running full nodes today continue to do so? Most likely.

In a material sense Zcash the blockchain will never vanish, but in a practical business sense, it would be gone.

Even Verge still exists today, but is it serious or relevant in the crypto ecosystem? No. I believe Zcash deserves a better place in the crypto ecosystem than Verge.

@dismad

Your fear is ripe, and borderline emotional.

See the above.

The logic is material.

And I’ll note here, so that it’s on my record.

If ZF, ECC, and ZCG have the capacity to become self-funding by Feb 28, 2024. Then I would agree with the flip the bird cohort.

However, I tend to think it is impossible for those 3 organizations to create reliable self funding solutions on such a short timeline.

It will be a much easier task to build Super Transparent features/ or whatever UI encoding solution it is that @hanh has already presented.

ECC is not known for getting anything done fast. So with only 2 months of time, we’re in a tight spot.

[dontpanicburns]

The requirement from Mica title V, chapter 3 Article 75

3. The operating rules of the trading platform for crypto-assets shall prevent the admission to trading of crypto-assets that have an inbuilt anonymisation function unless the holders of those crypto-assets and their transaction history can be identified by the crypto-asset service providers operating a trading platform for crypto-assets

mica link
best case scenario is the shielded pools would become as poisonous as tornado cash and eventually sanctioned

VARA is much more clear

The issuance of Anonymity-Enhanced Cryptocurrencies and all VA Activity[ies] related to them are prohibited in the Emirate.

[cznftmasterholder]

VARA explains it a bit more vague

“Anonymity-Enhanced Cryptocurrencies”
means a type of Virtual Asset which prevents the tracing of
transactions or record of ownership through distributed public
ledgers and for which the VASP has no mitigating technologies or
mechanisms to allow traceability or identification of ownership

[cznftmasterholder]

To me, it seems that both MiCA and VARA (and any jurisdiction in the world) should be able to handle ZEC, but not XMR (Monero).

[dismad]

@noamchom

It will be a much easier task to build Super Transparent features/ or whatever UI encoding solution it is that @hanh has already presented.

I believe even if we pull this off, it wont matter. The goal posts will always move. Thus, its a waste of time.

@dismad

The Binance Crackdown Will Be an 'Unprecedented' Bonanza for Crypto Surveillance | WIRED

[nuttycom]

@hanh would you be willing to write up your proposal here as a ZIP, so that it can be reviewed by the ZIP editors for security considerations and implemented consistently by various wallet providers in the ecosystem? That seems like the most productive next step to me, and that will also give the folks here who are working with Binance a proposal to point them to. If this proposal will satisfy Binance’s concerns, then I think it’s worth doing.

[noamchom]

Agree with this approach!

[noamchom]

@dismad

The goal posts will always move.

Just because the goal posts might always shift, there is no reason to cripple ourselves today, when better paths could be taken

[aquietinvestor]

@nuttycom

would you be willing to write up your proposal here as a ZIP, so that it can be reviewed by the ZIP editors for security considerations and implemented consistently by various wallet providers in the ecosystem?

@hanh I agree with Kris’ suggestion. If you have time to write the proposal in the form of a ZIP, it would be incredibly helpful, and it would also be great to have the ZIP editors review it before I send it to Binance. I originally planned to give Binance an outline based on the posts you wrote above, but a more detailed document would be preferable. Alternatively, if it’s more convenient for you, if you write up a detailed project summary, I can format it according to the ZIP standards. Thank you!

[dismad]

@noamchom

there is no reason to cripple ourselves today

@jelly5649

Zcash has to be anti-fragile. It won’t ever be if we bow at centralized exchanges ridiculous requests. Our tech is already compatible with compliance, they just have to use it.

This whole thing is a racket. This too shall pass.

[Autotunafish]

Hanhs supertransparent addresse idea is prototyped, go watch the video, maybe Binance will like them and it’s done. The clause however does not define the methodology or the extent to which VASP’s have to identify transaction histories. Any solution proposed to the under-defined mandate is still an assumption that it would satisfy overall and that Binance is going to strongly think so too.

Implementation of exchange type transparent addresses

[zkcroc]

To my reckoning the majority of the community are against changing the protocol so why go down the road of creating a ZIP to present to binance?

[aquietinvestor]

The solution that Hanh proposed does not require a change to the protocol.

Important: Potential Binance Delisting

If you want a new address type that makes sending funds from shielded very hard, it could be done without modifying the protocol by just defining a new encoding of a regular t-address. Basically, a wallet could take the same t-addr as before but represent it as this new t-addr (let’s call it t2). t and t2 can be converted back and forth as this is just a different encoding prefix: taddr ↔ t2addr From Binance perspective, the code change is minimal. They need to add this conversion in their ad…

[pacu]

I think that @hanh’s idea could work out for binance and wouldn’t make our protocol less private anyway.

I think that we should group together and start working on this ASAP.

[noamchom]

There is a massive difference.

Cold HW wallet support is boutique.

Retail CEX availability is mainstream / foundational (Binance quite literally is the global leader)

This Zcash forum participant base stumps me regularly, in how far in a vacuum some of our ideologies are.

It’s as if half of us have no conception about what the tried and true paths for technology adoption are, nor what makes for an asset to become investible and remain on a value accrual trend.

Based on some of the ideas proposed here, you really could be convinced that some of us were magically receiving coins out of thin air, simply because we knew the right people at the right time.

[noamchom]

It feels like a Bad Faith argument for you to be insinuating that Zcash and Bitcoin are theoretically comparable in the year 2024.

Bitcoin is a dominant, battle tested, crypto industry leader. Unfortunately we can’t say the same for Zcash yet

[pacu]

I think that caring about users and act fast should be the thing to do. It’s not deviating from Zcash’s mission.

I share your concerns about t-addreses. I suffer them myself every time I need to jump through hoops because of the complexity they bring to our tech stack. That suffering is shared by every Zcash dev.

But still, it’s not about ourselves the devs, it’s about people, and not leaving any zodler behind. That’s a priority the community voiced out really loud during the sandblasting attack.

We shouldn’t turn our backs on those users.

[kranzj]

Are we sure we should change the protocol for this? I feel like this is just one step towards outlawing the use of the private pools, rendering everything important about Zcash useless. If an exchange doesn’t want users to transfer directly from the private pool, they can just tell them that such funds will be hard to recover.

[battbot]

@hanh proposal doesn’t require changing the protocol…

[tokidoki]

@hanh

I don’t think it is a good idea to make it also harder to get.

Binance is not the only place to get ZEC. Also, outside of the US, sideshift.ai works wonders.

Let’s not waste efforts in getting ZEC not going into shielded pool.

Getting ZEC delisted would probably also means getting ZEC IOU out of Binance Chain, which is super net positive.