Hi Zeeps!
Welcome to the new year!
2024 was a remarkable year for Zcash and for ECC. We ushered in a new era for the project and began to set foundations that will reverberate into 2025 and the years following. I feel like we are just at the beginning of something transformative, and I’m honored to play a small part in it.
Last week, the ECC team gathered in Mexico with friends in the Zcash ecosystem, who joined us to set the course for next year. In this update, I’ll include some of the slides and summaries of the sessions. While I can’t recreate the connections and inspiration we drew from one another through dialogue, I will do my best to give you all a taste.
I’ve included several slides from the sessions below, along with beautiful photos taken by @Lukas and a shots from of our sessions.
As always, the theme of the Z|ECC Summit was Onward, a nod to our cypherpunk roots and our continued commitment to building a world where mankind has access to private and secure electronic cash.
If you aren’t familiar with them, we hold these sessions twice a year. If you are a builder in the community, you are welcome to join us at future summits. We plan to host the next one in Prague next July.
If you don’t have the time to read through this thread, here’s the TLDR of some of the specific outcomes and next steps:
- We will continue to focus on building a vertically integrated stack for Zcash, unlocking more through the capabilities and efforts of partners.
- This includes the ability to conduct cross-chain payments. This will begin with sending from shielded ZEC to any token supported by Maya and Thorchain.
- We will continue user and market research on a possible new Zashi Vault product.
- The core team will heavily focus on zcashd deprecation, the Zallet (cli wallet), and NU7 activation.
- Long-term decentralized governance will be a theme in 2025, and we’ll focus heavily on conversations and perspectives.
- We will continue to collaborate with partners like Keystone, Flexa, and Coinbase on co-marketing efforts and, in the early part of the year, increase marketing with others like Maya and Brave.
- We’ll clean up the roadmap and release it within the next week or so,
- The timeline for NU7 has shifted from a best-case of August to October. This has cascading implications that will be shared in forthcoming forum posts.
Kicking it off
We embarked on a voyage of seeing. All of us working on this project are a part of a grand calling. Since the dawn of time, day after day, the air and sea pour out speech, beckoning us to join their unexplored reaches. We are only here for a time, yet the air and sea will persist. It is our calling to journey forward across them during our time here and to do our part to help carry humanity ONWARD.
The week opened with ECC-only sessions to reflect on the prior year, discuss the current state of our finances, and set the stage for the rest of the week.
We reviewed our “hedgehog concept " and examined what ECC is uniquely positioned to provide to support the shared mission of the Zcash community.
These passions, values, and unique skill mix came from our previous Z|ECC summit last summer.
This is part of a framework for how we think about our readiness and capability to deliver innovation and accelerate its adoption. I argued that ECC began last year at the far left of this diagram and ended the year by delivering innovation through disciplined action. Now is the time to accelerate while we continue to build the flywheel that will propel Zcash to new heights.
The following summarizes some of the more significant things ECC, along with our partners and some of you, accomplished in 2024. These changes and accomplishments are quite remarkable and resulted from the aligned efforts of a talented and dedicated team that executed with a culture of discipline.
While we will continue to push hard into 2025, I encouraged the team to take a breath in Q1. Many of the team worked as much as 18 hours a day to get the Keystone hardware wallet support to the community before Christmas. While these kinds of sprints are sometimes necessary to get things over the line, we cannot always always work at this speed. Our roadmap for Q1 will allow the team to work at a reasonable pace.
Z|ECC Sessions
I began the first full day by revisiting our roots and purpose with the Zcash community and ECC team.
Bitcoin has lost something of its purpose and has ushered us into an era of increased financial surveillance. For us to reclaim that purpose, we will continue to embrace the ethos of those before us by building out a complete set of capabilities to empower the “Normie.”
Our means of doing that is developing the Zcash protocol, made useful by capable and user-friendly tooling in Zashi.
I then communicated a Vision for Zashi, including a potential new product, Zashi Vault.
As I shared in my Jan 1 X post, I see its place in the stack to look something like this.
This is where we’ll start in Q1.
This was slightly adjusted and further refined at the end of the week in our sessions on Maya integration, ZSAs, and roadmap planning.
@andrea then led us through a review of our work on Zashi this last year. We shipped Zashi iOS at the end of March 2024 and shipped 19 iOS and 16 Android releases in total last year.
But shipping is not enough. Here are the adoption stats available to us.
After a year of stagnation, shielded adoption took off!
For iOS:
For Android:
We then moved into an overview and conversation about Maya. The Maya team presented information on how it works, and we discussed how we’ll incorporate it into Zashi. Through fees, it may also provide a source of funding for ECC.
While we often talk about Maya in terms of “swaps,” eyes were opened when we framed it in terms of payments. Swaps are something you do for yourself. But imagine a scenario where a user wants to receive a payment in USDC rather than Zcash. Zashi will use Maya to allow users to send shielded ZEC to the receiver’s currency of choice.
Zcash on Maya will unlock a whole host of capabilities. So good.
We then spent the afternoon unboxing and playing with a special edition, the Keystone wallet, which allowed everyone to experiment with features in a group setting.
Psst. I have a few more of these beauties that we’ll be giving away to community members in the coming weeks!
The remainder of the afternoon was spent in a workshop led by @peacemonger on potential features and market comparison in support of Zashi Vault.
This was followed by a presentation and discussion on media memos led by the Brave team. A significant amount of the conversation shifted to questions of moderation and how to provide privacy and security while protecting users and the protocol from abuse.
Day 3
The third day (second day with the community present) was spent focusing on our Zcash protocol work.
@str4d led us through a session on NU7 ZIP proposals and the current timeline (presentation) and then, along with @daira, possibilities and timeline for NU8.
We agreed on the benefits of the NSM and its inclusion in NU7. We also discussed the impact of our Keystone work on the overall timeline and that we believe the most optimistic timeline for NU7 activation, as proposed today, has shifted from August to October.
Following that conversation, we heard from several community members about their work and perspectives on the ecosystem.
@pacu provided an overview of the developer ecosystem with specific observations and recommendations for community documentation. I believe that he will share that with the community later.
@mrkit2u provided an update on the Zcash to Avalanche bridge that he and his team at red·dev are building and the support being provided to them from the Avalance ecosystem.
And @emersonian announced a new project he is launching to become the Amazon of crypto with Zcash through incentives!
We concluded the afternoon with a deep dive into ZSAs, how they work, how they will be supported in Zashi, issuers, and trust, and the need for issuers ahead of the activation date to drive adoption.
The “formal” week concluded the following day with roadmap planning and discussions about the NU7 timeline and its impact on other initiatives, including community funding and governance. In the days ahead, I will summarize our thoughts and recommendations to the community.
The collaboration hasn’t stopped since the week ended. A number of the team are still in Mexico at a hacker house to begin our work for the year.
The following are the next steps we’ll take in the days ahead:
- Finalize and publish our Q1 roadmap
- A forum post on the current NU7 schedule and implications
- A forum post that describes a recommendation for governance, dev funding and implementation
- Begin work!
That’s it for this week!
Special thanks to the Maya team, @mrkit2u, @pacu, @emersonian and @ml_sudo for joining and engaging with us in person and to the Brave team for joining us remotely!
Until next time,
Onward.