I am trying to put up some charts to understand the adoption of shielded funds. I see that previous attempts in this forum are not maintained so I played a bit with the sources I could find. I did a quick verification and the official Zcash metrics match the data from Messari.
The advantage of using Messari is that it is possible to extract circulating supply data beside shielded supply, so I could easily get the utilization of shielded funds as a percentage of the circulating supply.
I imported these data to a trivial Excel sheet and produced the following chart:
There is some kind of support at 4% slowly growing to 5% around the end of last year.
There are two peaks of shielded adoption at roughly 8.25% around the end of November 2018 and the end of November 2021
The overall average adoption rate of shielded funds is 5,57%
Overall, the adoption of shielded addresses is still quite low. One reason that comes to my mind is that we still don’t have hardware wallet supporting it (but hopefully the grants to Ledger and Trezor will do). For example I store my ZEC on Ledger and have just a fraction of them shielded on Nighthawk.
Also, I can’t explain where the peaks of adoption come from, if they are driven by fundamental reasons or some technical improvement into supported wallets (e.g. automatic shielding). I guess that NU5 will help adoption of shielded addresses, especially when wallets and exchanges will start to support UAs.
Just my thoughts, hope it will sparkle some discussion in the community.
After the Trezor announcement, I noticed a Trezor Model T costs almost double what a Ledger Nano X costs. On the other hand, several mobile wallets will support or do support shielded addresses. I tried Edge wallet last week on iOS and at first it took a very long time to do the initial sync. Maybe this will be improved. Also, Zec Wallet Lite had some issues last week supporting the shielded transactions for the NFT promotion mentioned in this forum. I think mobile wallets might need more improvements in supporting NU5 and could be improved to sync more quickly after the initial installation. I dont think the average user will buy a hardware wallet separate from their mobile phone so maybe Trezor’s announcement may be a big deal for some of us, but not the average user. I am personally planning on migrating all my funds to the shielded pool via a Trezor now that it supports NU5 addresses.
Other than a single tweet mentioning Trezor support for NU5 in their latest update, I don’t think this has been sufficiently circulated.
This is where I found out:
and this is where I confirmed these firmware versions have been released already:
The most obvious explanation for low shielded supply % is because no central exchanges use those pools. If ECC were able to persuade a few of the Top 5 (and if this is technically legal and feasible) Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken then we’d see the shielded pool double or triple.
Can anyone from ECC weigh in to the question, are ECC held ZEC kept in the shielded pool?
Hi. Generally, there is little to no interest from exchanges to support storing ZEC in a shielded pool. It requires some engineering. There had been some discussion with Anchorage and Bitgo about shielded custody and providing them engineering support but no recent movement to my knowledge.
We at ECC have some stored in a pool and some stored with a custodian.
Note that dev fund outputs are required by consensus to be moved to shielded addresses as a first step. My understanding is that this is in fact done reasonably promptly, and so the fact that the hardcoded dev fund addresses are transparent doesn’t really have a significant effect. (The reason for the ECC addresses being transparent is that it allows them to be multisig, since support for FROST shielded multisig is not implemented yet.)
I remember shielded multi-sig not being available as part of one of the more recent conversations about it but beyond what the addys are (or where I suppose) I don’t know
Can anyone confirm that the supply circulating shown by Blockchair is correct? That number is about 4 million coins different from what I see in my Binance.US application on mobile.
