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Hi Zeeps,
I’ve been on the road, my body doesn’t know what time zone it is in, and I’ve been meeting with people non-stop. Exhilarating and exhausting. I won’t tell you where I am as I write this. I’m changing my opsec a bit and reducing my exposure.
About a week back, David Balland and his wife were kidnapped and held for ransom. The kidnappers weren’t necessarily after his crypto in this case but after crypto from Ledger, the company that he co-founded. But he was a target because of a perception that someone who cares about him had access to crypto. This was not the act of a single individual but a group of organized people. They are bank robbers, and he was the bank. They even did the “we cut off his finger to show you we’re serious, just like in the movies” thing.
According to Jameson Lopp, the number of crypto-related “wrench attacks” is on the upswing. If you want to see all the horrifying stories come out in real time, just follow him on X. Chilling stuff.
Jameson and others give all kinds of advice on how to protect yourself: don’t meet people you don’t know to exchange crypto, don’t flash your wealth, don’t brag on TikTok, etc. I remember hearing stories about thefts in Bogota at Dev Con not long ago; all seemed related to victims wearing crypto swag. Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t walk around wearing your diamond-encrusted diamond hands tee.
But if you are a Zcasher, you likely know these measures are insufficient. If you are not shielding your money, you are overexposed! The sophistication of non-state actors is still pretty low. However, the surveillance tools available to normies are rapidly becoming more accessible. Thanks to AI, transparent blockchains, and real-time data availability and persistence, this is coming:
It’s not science fiction, Zeeps. Traditional opsec is not going to protect you from snoops.
If you self-custody to be free from the gatekeepers, you must shield your assets, or you are overexposed. The freedom-touting Bitcoiners, the meme-loving normies, and the early merchant adopters are constantly flashing their wealth to the world. And when you flash your financial activity, you can’t go back and cover yourself up later. Leak it, and it is out there forever.
The freedom and security that crypto promises is only available to those who keep their payments and holdings private.
In my last update, I listed things we need to deliver Zcash to the world as “electronic cash” or “unstoppable private money.” I’ll relist them here:
- A protocol that works for private payments and storage at scale
- Healthy price action
- Broad distribution and access with deep liquidity
- Funding to add new innovation without risk of capture
- Interoperability with other innovations for greater utility and growth
- Censorship-resistant and decentralized infrastructure to support it
- A vibrant and loyal community of coin holders, users, promoters, and builders
We need scaleable Zcash and quickly. It’s a priority for @ebfull and will be for the ECC team when we get through our zcashd deprecation work. We also need to make it easy to use private payments and storage at scale, which is why we have focused on Zashi and capabilities such as hardware storage with Keystone. It’s also why we are digging into possibilities with Zashi Vault to provide much-needed features for improved security protections.
We must continue to ship code quickly and develop features and capabilities that deliver practical utility to protect users today. We must also prepare for the influx that will come as people become smarter about their own opsec and threats become more real.
Privacy is normal. And privacy is also necessary. When you lose it, and the threat comes to your front door, it’s too late. As crypto adoption goes more mainstream, the tools thieves have available become more pervasive, and the stories of thefts increase, we will be ready so that people can breathe easy, knowing that they haven’t exposed themselves unnecessarily to an often dangerous and dark world.
Stay safe. Shield it all.
Here’s what we built this week:
Our Q1 2025 Roadmap is shown below and will soon be on the Electric Coin Company website.
After a heavy push in Q4, the Zashi team is cleaning up technical debt and redesigning the interface a bit to make things EVEN MORE intuitive. I think you’ll love it. We’ll add new capabilities in March as part of our upcoming Zashi 2.0 release. User research is also back in full swing, with surveys going out to ECC ZAC members for feedback on Zashi Vault.
The Zcash core engineering team is focused on NU7-related activities this quarter, including Zallet, which will replace the current zcashd cli wallet, the implementation of memo bundles, and cross-ecosystem collaboration.
Zashi
Zashi Design
- Adjustments and revisions to Transaction History screens (Sent & Received)
- Continuing design efforts for Balances, Shield ZEC, and Swap
- Adhoc edits and adjustments for engineering
- ECC 2025 Roadmap graphic
- Adjustments and improvements to Restore Wallet flow
Q&A and Dev Support
- Populated Zashi info on Web3Privacy explorer
- Added Zashi-Coinbase Integration info to ZecHub
- User Support: Discord, X, & Email
- Testing Zashi Android & iOS internal builds
- Transaction History Redesign: Linear & GitHub Issues
- Working on the 1st draft of a QA checklist
Zashi iOS
- Transaction History Redesign
- Implemented Filters business logic and UI
- Implemented Search business logic and UI
- Tweaked transaction details for all possible states (transparent vs. shielded addresses, sent/received/shielded, etc.)
- Added shimmer loading animations
- Implemented UI and logic for Add a Note feature
- SDK: query for search in memos
- SDK: failed transaction timestamps
- Fixed broken navigation root cause of never-ending sending animation
- Tech Debt:
- transactions handling
- new solution uses shared state and massively reduces scattered code
- PoC: Discover birthday based on a given date so we can improve the onboarding experience
Analytics Update:
Unique Installs: 6.21k
Total Downloads: 7.37k
AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- Transaction History Redesign:
- Implemented Brand new Transaction History screen
- Implemented Transaction Detail screen
- Implemented Transaction Filters (Full-text search is WIP)
- Created a transaction metadata object that is stored similarly to the Address book implementation
- Added a new private transaction note logic (create/update)
- Analyzed what are our possibilities for reproducible builds across stores
Analytics Update:
Total Install Base: 3.38k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 13.7k
PlayStore Rating: 4.452*
Zcash Core
- Zallet is now at functional-alpha status! It can sync the chain (when connected to a lightwalletd server) and a couple of the zcashd wallet RPC interfaces have been implemented so we now have templates for how to go about the implementation of more of the zcashd wallet replacement functionality.
- no_std support for zcash_primitives has been merged; this will allow us to replace the bespoke transaction signature generation code in the Keystone firmware with the standard signing code used by the rest of our wallets. This will facilitate the NU7 migration, by making it so that Keystone will just need to update the version of zcash_primitives that they depend upon when the time comes. In addition, this means that it becomes easy to implement Sapling support in the Keystone firmware, if we so desire.
- Greg’s initial implementation of transparent script interpreter functionality in Rust has merged to zcash_script. There are a couple of follow-up PRs to come, but this paves the way for supporting transparent multisig functionality in Zashi, Zallet, and the Keystone wallet.
- We’re nearing completion on support for transparent address gap limit handling, which will allow anyone who has funds in a fully-transparent wallet to migrate their seed phrase into Zashi or Keystone and obtain access to all their transparent funds. In addition, this support means that if someone has had a TEX address deposit rejected by an exchange and sent back to the interstitial transparent address, they’ll regain access to those funds.
Other
We’re deep into interviews for a strategic marketing manager. We are a little behind where we’d like to be, but making progress.
ICYMI, check out @pacu’s summary of Z|ECC day 2 and his call to action for a ZSA Summit.
That’s all for this week.
Working to keep you from overexposure,
Onward.