I’ve come across a new QR-based hardware wallet called Keystone that looks pretty interesting. So I decided to make a thread here to see if anyone else is familiar with the project and has an interest in seeing them submit a ZOMG grant. I think they could potentially be a good partner for the Zcash ecosystem. Shielded HW wallet support is in demand and I think it would be good to have a little competition/alternatives to Ledger and Trezor.
Keystone seems to have put a lot of emphasis into usability, improved security, and has an appreciation for open source/transparency. Check out a presentation they created with links to various blog posts on these topics here.
I discovered Keystone during a discord community call while following the upcoming launch of @mhluongo’s Metamask replacement, Tally. Tally has gained significant community following (check out their discord!) due to their interest in developing an open source alternative to Metamask that will also have a fair launch community owned token. Long term I would love to see support for Zcash ZSAs integrated into Tally + hardware wallet (as well as our home-grown tools!). The Tally community is inspiring and I think with ZSAs on the horizon this community could become eventual users of Zcash if they’re not already.
From a 20,000’ view, while I’m super appreciative of our in-house home-grown projects like Nighthawk, Zecwallet, and the lightweight web wallet that is in the works, I think the Zcash community could benefit from working with other projects such as Tally that have significant community following.
While having these home-grown tools is great for the resiliency of Zcash, I’m partially of the opinion that we need to have our community working with/on integrations to other major projects that already have large communities too. I think that expecting the masses to enter our siloed ecosystem when they’re “ready for privacy” is the wrong approach. Why not fund a dev to work on a task to integrate shielded Zcash/encrypted memos into Tally so that people who are playing within the Tally ecosystem can take advantage of Zcash encrypted memos and feel empowered with privacy. Then when ZSAs are out we help them integrate ZSAs? Maybe Tally is not ready for that. Maybe we’re not ready for that. Maybe there are better ideas. But I do think we need to start thinking about how we can work with existing communities to offer privacy to them instead of expecting users to come to us. It’s a wild idea but I do believe the future is multi-chained. If it is multi-chained, then we need to start thinking beyond our walls and how we can enable other chains or users of other chains/apps with privacy. This will bring healthy community participants to us and help us grow.