Hi folks! ECC’s current understanding is that Ledger needs an organization (not an individual) to sign a document committing to ensuring the following:
ZCG contacted us and we thought about this. We would love for Ledger to implement full shielding support! Many of us use Ledger hardware wallet devices to protect our crypto from bugs and hacks in software, and it would be perfect if when doing so you could also protect your ZEC from prying eyes!
Having thought about it, we decided that ECC cannot commit to this at this time, because we are a small (but mighty) team with limited resources. As such, we need to focus all of our efforts on delivering tangible results as soon as possible in each of our four focus areas:
- Deploying Zashi wallet — contact me if you want to be a beta tester and if you have a strong stomach for finding bugs and reporting them in great detail!
- Our SDKs and Zcash Core Libs which are used by Nighthawk, Edge, Unstoppable, and now Brave (in addition to Zashi, and in addition to several other users of our code) — see our recent release of ECC SDK 2.0.
- Policy advocacy to ensure that self-custody, privacy, and staking remain legal and remain reputable. These are virtuous things that good people do in the United States of America. See the upcoming Global Encryption Day congressional briefing in Washington D.C. that our Head of U.S. Public Policy and Strategic Advocacy, Paul Brigner, is organising.
- Making it possible for Zcash users to transition to Proof-of-Stake — see our current work on designing, security-analyzing, and prototyping the Zcash Trailing Finality Layer. (Which would fix the issue with lack-of-finality that has caused Coinbase to recently limit its support for Zcash.)
Inasmuch as we can do so, we would definitely like to support the Zcash community in solving this so that we have sustainable, supported, shielded Zcash in Ledger. It sounds like to me that what the Zcash community needs is an organization willing to step up and take on that responsibility, and then I’m guessing that Ledger probably needs to vet that organization and achieve a certain level of confidence in its sustainability and professionalism.
One thing that I can potentially do to help is to continue to introduce to ZCG any such candidate organizations who reach out to me. Off the top of my head, here is a quick brainstorm of potential candidates: Zcash Foundation, Nighthawk Apps, Equilibrium, Shielded Labs, Zondax, Red Dev, Qedit, and finally… Ledger itself! If Ledger values this unique feature for its users, and wants to take on the responsibility of maintaining the code, that could be a perfect solution in which Ledger effectively becomes a part of the Zcash support ecosystem!