Hi Zeeps,
This week was a struggle, marked by personal health issues, fatigue, frustration and some difficult introspection. As an Anglican, it’s also Holy Week, so it’s fitting. In my faith, it is intended to be a time of self-reflection and appreciation for the cost of redeeming the choices we’ve made.
My work with ECC on Zcash is rewarding and I cannot imagine doing anything else. It’s the great honor of my life to occupy the seat in which I sit and the most rewarding work I have ever done. But it is also grind, year after year. The gravity of the cause, the weight of what it means and will mean for people, the arrows that fly even within our midst, and the size of our true foe. And we must win with only five smooth stones and a small sling.
But tomorrow is Easter. It’s a day of renewal, and change!
I witnessed significant change this week. I found it in the rallying of support for our work at a level I haven’t seen in some time. @zooko posted this tweet and it went viral.
Strong leaders across crypto retweeted or quote-tweeted, adding their voices to the chorus of those who value privacy, human rights, and how this community is delivering those things in the project called Zcash.
I saw it in Barry Silbert’s steadfast commitment to Zcash and financial privacy. I saw it in Vitalik’s thoughtful essay on privacy. The chorus of voices is growing. Privacy MUST be protected.
This song came to mind, and I found myself listening to it again and again, with renewed strength and conviction to bring about change. Today, I’ve been reading through the lyrics as I listened.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
Tomorrow is a new spring and the order is rapidly fadin’, for the times they a-chaingin’.
Here are ECC’s contributions to Zcash this week:
Zashi
Zashi Design
- Continued work on Crosschain Payments designs
- Progressed on Multi-Account support designs
- Small ad hoc product and engineering requested edits
- Finalizing Spendable Balance designs and adding dark theme designs
Q&A and Dev Support
- User Support
- QA & Testing
- Comms & Socials
- Community Management
Zashi iOS
Zashi 1.5.3 version prepared and released 
SDK
- FFI Scan and recovery progress adopted
- TOR APIs implemented
- TOR APIs adopted in the interface with fallback option to previous LightWalletd service
Zashi 0.6.3-x Internal
- Adopted SDK with TOR and new recovery progress reporting
- Implemented new Spendable component with smart logic
- Spendable Balance bottom sheet implemented with custom dynamic height handling for updates
- Shielding processing refactored to have one source of truth with state handling in the root of Zashi
Analytics Update:
- Unique Installs: 7.4k
- Total Downloads: 8.86k
- AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Zashi Android
- Finished and merged the logic for estimating block height from date in SDK
- Prepared changes for the new recovery progress reporting logic in SDK
- Finished the new Crash Reporting Opt In/Out screen and logic in Zashi
- WIP: Worked on the new networking calls over TOR in the SDK
- Implemented global error handling & logic to decife whether to show a dialog or a bottom sheet UI
- Implemented error updated UI for syncing & shielding error with Report button
- Implemented new Spendable component with a smart logic
- Implemented Spendable Balance bottom sheet
- Connected logic for estimating block height feature + updated design to be in line with iOS native date picker
- Resolved numerous bug fixes, performance bottlenecks and design updates including icons, paddings, texts, etc.
- Implemented new Crash Reporting opt-in UI
Analytics Update:
- Total Install Base: 3.76k
- Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 17.4k
- PlayStore Rating: 4.519*
Zcash Core
This has been a community-focused week for the ECC core team.
- We have performed a substantial review of QEDit PRs in the sinsemilla, halo2, and orchard repositories. There is still more to be done here, but the ZSA PRs are making progress.
- We released Zcashd 6.2.0 and discussed the related API deprecations with various ecosystem partners. Those discussions will influence our development of the zallet interfaces needed to ensure continuity of service.
- Str4d did a lot of work updating dependencies in the zkcrypto stack to facilitate the use of some updated core Rust libraries requested by several projects in the Rust cryptography community.
- We pushed forward with integrating the Blockchain Commons ZeWIF format into zallet, allowing the import of wallets from the zcashd wallet.dat format. We are preparing several pull requests to improve ZeWIF, smoothing out impedance mismatches and ensuring that data is encoded in a way that is maximally useful to wallet developers.
- Kris provided community support for ruzcash’s TypeScript library for parsing Unified Addresses and for Pacu’s PR to add “send max” functionality to the zcash_client_backend wallet library, so that this functionality can be integrated into all the wallets that use the ECC wallet stack.
- We provided support for enabling transaction submission and retrieval via TOR in the ECC wallet SDKs and Zashi.
- zallet now supports using multiple mnemonic seeds and multiple accounts associated with each mnemonic seed.
- We found a couple of issues in Zaino and Zebrad, and where appropriate submitted PRs to fix them (zebra-state: Return only the history tree root in GetBlockTemplateChainInfo response by nuttycom · Pull Request #9444 · ZcashFoundation/zebra · GitHub, `z_gettreestate` incorrectly assumes presence of `finalState` · Issue #9445 · ZcashFoundation/zebra · GitHub, `JsonRpSeeConnector::get_treestate` errors when getting old treestates from `zcashd` · Issue #292 · zingolabs/zaino · GitHub).
Other
Polling has begun on Zcash funding governance and will run through May 1st. ECC, Shielded Labs and the Zcash Foundation have all endorsed the C&C mode, as has @Zancas from Zingo Labs.
I participated in a ZecHub-hosted town hall to discuss funding governance models.
I met with Rhea team to get introduced and discuss future plans.
I had great conversations with @ebfull and @alchemydc about areas for increased alignment and collaboration across the ecosystem.
In case you missed it. 
That’s all for this week.
Bringing change,
Onward.
.