Hi Zeeps,
I returned this week from Dubai, where I participated in the Satoshi Roundtable with other crypto leaders. The event is an invite-only unconference where attendees choose the topics. Each topic was organized into a track, given a time slot, and various locations set up around the hotel where people gathered to discuss that topic. Topics started at 8:30, and conversations ran late into the night. I participated in groups as small as 5 and as large as 15. It was a kind of beautiful anarchy. And no shilling was allowed.
Enough people wanted to talk about privacy that it became its own track!
Bruce Fenton is the organizer, and he kicked off the week with a fantastic speech that set the tone: “The tyrants won’t give up. Now is the time when we must accelerate. We can dare to dream big. ”
It’s been twenty-four years since I last visited Dubai. If you know my story, it was there that I first learned about the power of surveillance—the power that comes from aggregating data, assessing what is there, and observing its changes over time. That is why, when I later learned about Bitcoin, I became concerned with the information that is continuously and eternally posted for everyone to see. It was why I became a Zcasher.
Much has changed in Dubai since I last visited. The Emirate has transformed. At the time, it was just starting to stretch its arms outward and upward. The leaders stared into the sands and saw a vision of what it might be. They built and scaled it with infrastructure that brought utility, diversification, modernization, and a vibe. It now stretches into the sky.
As I traveled home exhausted, encouraged, exhilarated, and ever-more resolute, I posted the following:
I spent a lot of time with one Zeep, who showed me a preview of what NEAR launched today. We can finally permissionlessly swap to ZEC from other assets. I can’t overstate how important this is for our collective freedom from the gatekeepers who seek to surveil everything we do. Thank you to you Zeeps who made this happen!
I spent time with another Zeep, a miner who has been patiently zodling every ZEC his mining company mines in anticipation of the future. He offered to help lean in on viaBTC and our current mining centralization issues.
I met a young Zeep who is considering how to best market Zcash’s capabilities to a new generation of people entering the space.
I spent time with a Zeep who is committed to working behind the scenes and across projects to support our work in whatever way they can to see Zcash scale.
Zcash founding scientist Eli Ben-Sasson was also there, and we had the chance to catch up on STARKs, current bottlenecks, and opportunities for us to consider.
So much energy!
But a word of warning: I met with one Zeep, who is still a Zeep, but who told me that this forum is demoralizing. They only recently got excited about Zcash, came here, and left unsure. What you say here and how you say it matters. People are watching. Ask yourself: Are you leading, encouraging, and supporting our growth, or are you pushing people away?
Now is the time to scale.
It’s time to scale the protocol where @ebfull and others are focused.
It’s time to improve its performance, as we at ECC and many of you have been pursuing.
It’s time to scale up user adoption with a world-class user experience through Zashi and others.
It’s time to scale up our “stack” through interop like what was launched with NEAR today.
It’s time to scale up our teams as Shielded Labs has been doing.
It’s time to scale up our outreach, community, and positive engagement, as many of you are doing.
And we will continue to scale up.
Out of the shifting sands of this world.
Out of the barren landscape of surveillance and tyranny.
Out of the soullessness that has crept into the crypto landscape.
We must scale up out of the desert.
And we will scale up because we must win.
There is no other option.
Build it. Scale it. Shield it.
Here’s what we built this week:
Zashi (from @Andrea)
Zashi Design
- Onboarding Redesign: Create & Restore Wallet flow
- Adjustments and revisions to Seed Phrase and Wallet Birthday Height designs
- Thinking through Secret Recovery Phrase designs (researching inspo and designing new concepts)
- Adjustments and iterations for App Home Screen (Empty State and Seed Phrase backup banner)
- Adhoc engineering edits and improvements (Keystone)
Q&A and Dev Support
- User Support: Discord, X, & Email
- Testing Zashi Android & iOS internal builds with Transaction History Redesign
- Zashi - testing Keystone fixes and improvements
- Brainstorming about the Zashi Website
- QA Checklist draft review
- ECC/Zashi Roadmap - Blog + Socials
- Review and share Z|ECC summit session notes
- Start testing & documenting of Zashi Send & Receive user flows w/ Exchanges
Zashi iOS
- Keystone flows and QR fixes
- Implemented Tap to enlarge QR code
- Implemented Automatic full brightness
- Updated Keystone SDK
- Keystone added to Integrations screen
- Implemented optimizations and Improvements for older and slower devices
- Reset Zashi logic enhanced to cover more edge cases and error reports
- Resolved issue around corrupted keychain data and inability to get out of this state for a user
- Many smaller fixes and improvements
Analytics Update:
Unique Installs: 6.29k
Total Downloads: 7.47k
AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- SDK:
- Improved transaction handling APIs with TransactionId object
- Added the new get-transaction-by-memo-substring API
- Added a timestamp for failed transactions
- Zashi App:
- Bumped Flexa libraries to the latest version 1.0.11, which removed unnecessary unused READ_PHONE_STATE permissions
- Keystone integration added to the Integrations screen
- The Zashi QR now provides tap-to-enlarge functionality with automatic full-brightness
- Refactored the internal transaction handling business logic
- Did a few minor bug fixes and performance updates
- Alternative Zashi deployment:
- Started to work on our two new deployment targets: GitHub Releases and F-Droid
- Enforcing FOSS (Free and open source software) principles - WIP
- Created a new Zashi Foss build type.
- Started to work on the CI part with the help of Yasser, too.
Analytics Update:
Total Install Base: 3.44k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 14k
PlayStore Rating: 4.469*
Zcash Core (from @nuttycom)
- This week, the ECC core team spent a lot of time on specification work. We reviewed & merged most of the ZSA Protocol: Transfer, Issuance and Burn: ZIPs 226, 227, and 230 ZIP, and followed it up with additional recommendations and changes in ZIP 227: Replace `asset_desc` with its hash in `AssetId` by str4d · Pull Request #975 · zcash/zips · GitHub.
- We worked on specifying how to approach associated metadata encryption for mobile wallets and also worked on updates for ZIP 315, describing considerations around transparent address linkability for mobile wallets.
- We added wallet initialization to Zallet and set up a comprehensive CI infrastructure for the project.
- @str4d analyzed the Keystone firmware to determine which components are most responsible for the binary’s growth. We want to ensure that the Keystone folks are well-informed when deciding whether to split privacy coins into a separate firmware build (and hopefully make that unnecessary).
- We have successfully demonstrated the recovery of locked funds from a bricked Ledger device via our Keystone integration using zcash-devtool. The necessary functionality will be integrated into Zashi, coming soon.
Other
I met with Sean to get an update on his scaling research and discuss STARKs and lattices as alternatives to SNARKs.
I had a call with Jonathan at Qedit to discuss what was needed to support a zBTC ZSA. @aquietinvestor and I then discussed the concern about not having something in place soon after NU7 activation and @pacu’s idea of better ZSA coordination. We’re working on the next steps.
I met with one of the Tari cofounders in Dubai. He gave me a demo of the product they are launching soon. The user experience is unlike anything I’ve seen in crypto. It’s something to watch.
This went viral on Tik Tok. This one got even more attention! Nice job by Zcash Media to get these out there!
@peacemonger released a survey about security and the needs of zodlers to ZAC members and other users. The data is insightful. She is now conducting user interviews and has plans for a follow-up survey. Thank you to everyone who responded and for engaging more deeply. It’s incredibly valuable to ensure we build the products you want.
That’s all for this week.
Scaling up,
Onward.
