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)