Hi Zeeps,
This week’s update is late. There are a couple of reasons, but the most significant is that I flew my daughter out to DC to hang out with me for the weekend. I prioritized time with her over everything else. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Lost time is never found again.”
We all have some cognitive understanding that we only have so much time. What we choose to prioritize matters a great deal. Where we decide to focus matters a great deal.
In crypto, I wonder if you see what I see. While I am optimistic about some changes in the crypto regulatory landscape, I am deeply concerned that these changes are resulting in capture. Crypto will no longer be free but constrained to the boundaries of regulators and traditional financial institutions. We saw firsthand this week that we cannot trust these institutions with our information. KYC is flawed, centralized custodial services are beholden to their regulators, and governments, in their thirst for control and power, are doubling down on surveillance and penalties for non-compliance.
We only have so much time. We must move fast, write code, and ship fast. If we don’t deliver code that enables financial self-custody and privacy at scale, the world will soon run out of options.
I rolled out an internal experiment late last week to optimize ECC’s time. It’s based on Andreessen’s Guide to Personal Productivity. We have been spending too much time on status updates and meetings within our org and externally, resulting in redundancy, continuous context-switching, overloaded hours, and distraction. I have cut most regularly scheduled status meetings and asked that the team delegate a single participant for external status meetings. It’s not that we won’t meet, it’s just that we will be highly intentional with our time. We’ll try this mode for six weeks and then reassess.
It’s easy for us all to get lost scrolling on social media and opining on all manner of things, ticking things off task lists, and mindlessly attending meetings because they happen to be on our calendars. But for us Zcashers, we don’t have time to waste.
If you are reading this, you already have open eyes. But beyond acknowledgment, you can make a long-lasting substantive impact on our world by building, using, promoting, supporting, and discussing things that increase adoption outside the traditional financial system. Cut ruthlessly. Think deeply. Focus narrowly. Ship repeatedly. Hand in hand. We haven’t a moment to lose.
Here’s where ECC spent our time last week:
Zashi
Zashi Design
- Continued work on Cross-chain Payments designs (research into SwapKit and Near)
- Small ad hoc product and engineering requested edits
- Adjustments to Select Recipient, Save Recipient, and Add New Contact designs
- Collecting crypto coin icons for Cross-chain Payment designs
- Continued work on the Zashi landing page
Q&A and Dev Support
- Release + Development testing
- User Support Issues (Discord/email)
- Community Management
- Socials Management
- Supporting product research efforts
Zashi iOS
Zashi 2.0:
- Swap and Pay PoC
- SDK with Tor, another iteration with no fallback and default TorClient
- UA with no transparent receiver adopted in Zashi with refactor for defaultUA & privateUA
Zashi iOS 2.0.3 release prepared for next week
Analytics Update:
- Unique Installs: 7.82k
- Total Downloads: 9.47k
- AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- 2 most recurring crashes resolved
- Several less recurring crashes resolved
- Looking into user-reported issues
- Zashi Android 2.0.2 released to Beta and Production
- UA with no transparent receiver adopted in Zashi with refactor for defaultUA & privateUA - pushed for testing
- preparing Zashi Android 2.0.3 release for next week
Analytics Update:
- Total Install Base: 3.74k
- Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 18.5k
- PlayStore Rating: 4.509*
Zashi Product Marketing
Published privacy-related communications this week.
Zcash Core
- This week was more incremental progress on zallet; we got z_sendmany merged, and we made more progress on zcashd wallet import.
- We hope to have an MVP of Zallet in the coming week that can fully function as a wallet and has at least the key import from zcashd complete.
Other
- I participated on a panel at Consensus called “Privacy is Normal.”
- Attended an intimate dinner with other crypto leaders - great conversations and a few follow-ups will come.
- Met with a Congressional office and discussed the importance of code-as-speech to keeping innovation in the US.
- Recorded a to-be-released podcast with Shielded Labs along with Alex at ZF.
That’s all for this week.
Maximizing time,
Onward.