Nighthawk Apps 2023 Quarterly Report

[NighthawkApps]

At Nighthawk Apps, we are pleased to share our quarterly updates with the Zcash community. Since last fall, there have been some unexpected external challenges in our journey, particularly with app publishing platforms blocking Nighthawk app updates(which was resolved), this temporarily affected our ability to publish quarterly reports to the community given the sensitive nature; then followed by the wallet maintenance funding being rejected affecting Nighthawk Wallet end-user support, and the unforeseen withdrawal of funding from the ongoing Thorchain integration work. However, we’ve remained dedicated to the ongoing grants and have made significant strides in several areas to continue researching and building tech given our commitment to the growing privacy-preserving money tech needs around the world.

Some highlights of the success stories of our 2023 grant:

In the Nighthawk Wallet roadmap, we’ve delivered all the milestones but one: the addition of third-party integrations. We are pleased to report that work with Flexa SpendKit SDK has commenced, and we’re optimistic about the opportunities this partnership will bring for the Amped-up Nighthawk Wallet user base.

ZcashBlockExplorer.com: the explorer saw growth in adoption per the bandwidth increase, making it an essential tool for users seeking transparency and privacy in their transaction info. Our lightwalletd.com distributed solution has seen a surge in traffic due to increased integrations from Zcash service providers. Both these services are critical for the Zcash network and its users given the reliance on public APIs opened up for use by developers and wallets including (Brave Browser Wallet)[Code search results · GitHub] and (others)[Code search results · GitHub].

The lightwalletd and zcashblockexplorer.com services are currently funded through May 30, 2024. To continue operating these services beyond that date, an extension grant will be required to avoid service interruption. The cost of extending the lightwalletd infrastructure by one year, maintaining the current custom-built, audited k8s setup with load balancing and scaling capabilities, is $200,000. This budget includes high-TB bandwidth.

A reduced budget of $140,000 would be sufficient to cover the costs of running the mainnet and testnet versions of each product without the globally distributed infrastructure and endpoints. These costs are standard given the k8s setup and include all necessary expenses.

As an independent team, based outside the U.S. our services benefit mission-critical users, and we look forward to gauging the community’s interest in developing new integrations and servicing our existing and upcoming projects.

Here are the 2023 quarterly reports and slides from our presentation at Zcon4:

Q2: Nighthawk Status report Q2 2023.pdf (166.2 KB)

Q3: Nighthawk Status report Q3 2023.pdf (211.6 KB)

Q4: Nighthawk Status report Q4 2023.pdf (201.5 KB)

Zcon4: Nighthawk Roadmap for Zcash.pdf (1.5 MB)

[Jgx7]

@NighthawkApps

The lightwalletd and zcashblockexplorer.com services are currently funded through May 30, 2024. To continue operating these services beyond that date, an extension grant will be required to avoid service interruption. The cost of extending the lightwalletd infrastructure by one year, maintaining the current custom-built, audited k8s setup with load balancing and scaling capabilities, is $200,000. This budget includes high-TB bandwidth.

A reduced budget of $140,000 would be sufficient to cover the costs of running the mainnet and testnet versions of each product without the globally distributed infrastructure and endpoints. These costs are standard given the k8s setup and include all necessary expenses.

I personally think we are way over invested in single asset third party wallets. So my vote is No.

The “mission-critical” users should be funding the wallet. The Zcash community (outside of ZEC holders) needs to step up.

[kworks]

Hi Nighthawk Apps,

Thanks for the update.
Recently and RFP posted by ZCG for lightwalletd service providers has been posted. I asked one of the individuals about the solution they are proposing:

The infrastructure in your plan, how many light clients can it service?

@emersonian
If there are existing benchmark or load simulation tools for Lightwalletd I am happy to point them at our existing hardware to try to ballpark. Perhaps an existing Lightwalletd maintainer can chime in.

We will transparently share metrics and lessons learned while deploying and maintaining this infrastructure. Once it is all live and observed for a period of time we should be able to much better understand what hardware to recommend when others are launching their own Lightwalletd nodes

Can you share any insights, any existing benchmarks or load simulation tools for Lightwalletd?
Can you share any analytics for the load traffic your infrastructure has received?
Will Nighthawk Apps apply to the RFP - Zcash Lightwalletd Infrastructure?

Oh right, I support single asset wallets I think they are essential in the development cycle.

Thanks

[Chlup]

Any news about NH ios wallet or is it just getting slowly obsolete and dangerous to use?

[Autotunafish]

With the end of the nightHawk lightwalletd server grant coming soon and inability to set a customer server in nightHawk wallet, it is forseable that the wallet will stop working.

[pacu]

Strictly technically speaking: public lightwalletd infrastructure and a Zcash block explorer are actually “mission-critical”.

[emersonian]

@NighthawkApps

maintaining the current custom-built, audited k8s setup with load balancing and scaling capabilities

Hi Nighthawk! Is your Kubernetes setup open-sourced? I am working on Helm charts for lightwalletd, it would be nice to not repeat work. Thanks!

[dismad]

@NighthawkApps

The lightwalletd and zcashblockexplorer.com services are currently funded through May 30, 2024. To continue operating these services beyond that date, an extension grant will be required to avoid service interruption. The cost of extending the lightwalletd infrastructure by one year, maintaining the current custom-built, audited k8s setup with load balancing and scaling capabilities, is $200,000. This budget includes high-TB bandwidth.

A reduced budget of $140,000 would be sufficient to cover the costs of running the mainnet and testnet versions of each product without the globally distributed infrastructure and endpoints. These costs are standard given the k8s setup and include all necessary expenses.

Z̶c̶a̶s̶h̶B̶l̶o̶c̶k̶E̶x̶p̶l̶o̶r̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶

[Autotunafish]

I like the ascii art!
The night Hawk wallet itself is updated with the latest zec.rocks and custom server selection so it still works.