I didn’t understand Mark Rothko until the day I stood before his work, and it overcame me.
Art has the power to affect me. I’m interested in the technicalities, but the thing that grabs me from the inside and spins me around, is the story told. Sometimes it’s the story in the faces and bodies that capture emotion in history and myth, as seen in the Raft of the Medusa or the Les Sabines. Sometimes it’s the mix of swirling vibrant colors and the story behind the art, like Van Gogh’s Church at Auvers-sur-Oise.
Two things in particular draw me in: the use of scale and color. And I need to experience them in person.
When I walked into the Tate in London one afternoon, I had almost zero expectations. I’m not much into modern art, but I was there to see a Lichtenstein exhibit and meander around the museum for the first time. I soon found myself in a room with Rothko.
I immediately sat down on a bench in the middle of the room. I had to. The force and depth of what I was seeing took breath from my lungs and my feet from underneath me. One by one, the paintings approached, and invited me to explore stillness in my soul, a feeling of profound loneliness in a vast universe, and paradoxically, the comfort that my solitude is a shared experience.
You can’t truly understand my reaction that day, or even what I’m expressing here, unless you have experienced it for yourself. It’s true of anything, really. You can’t know how it feels to be self-sovereign unless you’ve chosen to live it out. You can’t understand what crypto is unless you’ve used it. It’s difficult to comprehend the importance of privacy until your privacy and agency have been taken from you.
Posts on X, bars on a chart, buys and sells in an order book, or allocations into an ETF are not the same. They are like observing art captured as pictures in a book or on a screen, only representations of something much deeper.
If you haven’t held Zcash in a self-custodial wallet such as Zashi, swapped it with other coins, and spent it on things you need, you are living in the abstract rather than experiencing the freedom that it provides. Instead, I welcome you to enter the room and drink deeply. Live out your self-sovereignty. You’ll feel the difference and come to understand something profound. You won’t be the same.
Here’s what we created this week:
Zashi
What we did:
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Zashi 2.4.8 (shipping next week
**):** updated transparent addresses to shielded for swaps and payments, fixed several user-reported issues on Android. -
Zashi 2.4.9: built a feature to allow a user to turn on Tor before wallet restore, error handling improvements for testing, resync wallet, and updated the Reset Zashi feature on Android.
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Finalized the UI for the Disconnect Hardware feature and made improvements to the Connect flow - allowing a user to resync as a part of the flow to improve UX.
What’s up next:
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Zashi 2.4.9 Resync and Disconnect features for Keystone and other UX/UI improvements.
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Review finalized designs for Transparent Address Rotation, Ledger Hardware Wallet support, Multi-Account support, and other improvements.
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Finalize open designs for Duress/Decoy Wallet features and prepare them for review.
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Work on improving the product design/management and engineering processes into predictable, scalable workflows.
iOS Analytics
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Unique Installs: 27k (3k increase)
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Total Downloads: 31.1k (3.5k increase)
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AppStore Rating: 4.9* (unchanged)
Android Analytics
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Total Install Base: 13.2k (1.4k increase
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Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 34.3k (1.9k increase)
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PlayStore Rating: 4.3* (0.05 increase)
Swap Volume
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November: $125.9M
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YTD: $211.3M
Zcash Core
What we did:
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Zallet updated to use the Zaino ChainIndex interface. Zallet is no longer operating as essentially a light client; it is now using more direct access to the state of the backing full node.
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A significant refactoring and cleanup is underway to move reusable business logic out of the zcash_client_sqlite data storage layer into zcash_client_backend. This is part of the effort to add the ability to scan for transparent spends and outputs as part of compact block scanning, which is a prerequisite for transparent address rotation in Zashi. In addition, this work will simplify maintenance of the zcash_client_memory crate that is used as the data store for WebZjs.
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Orchard ZSA review is underway
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Quantum resilience spec is complete and in review
What’s up next:
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In person meetings for Q4/2026 engineering planning
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Complete Orchard ZSA review
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Review and merge backlog of outstanding PRs
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Lightwalletd release with new transparent compact block scanning
Other:
Zypherpunk Hackathon live!
Announced the Jan Z|ECC Summit.
Zaki and c-node discuss the state of Zcash.
Interviewing candidates for a Zashi Support and Community Manager and Zashi Partnerships roles.
Participated in the Georgetown University Business School Career Day.
That’s all for this week!
Painting,
Onward.
