Recently, I’ve been starting to think economically about the Zcash ecosystem, so I’m trying to think of unmet needs, or useful services, that consumers have/want. I think the terms “programmability” or “smart money” or even “wallets” are just kind of darts that can be thrown at the board to answer “what should be built next?” But I think a better question to ask is what each of those things may be enabling (applications, utility), what are the real use cases, what are we missing?
Let’s start with the most basic function that a private currency would ideally have. And in the interest of time, I leave a lot of detail out for now.
(1) Store of Value → Ability to easily, safely, and privately self-custody or custody coins that maintain a user’s value over time. How are we doing there? I would say modest at best for average users. What do we need to improve?
(2) Medium of Exchange → Ability to easily, safely, privately use zec to pay for goods and services. How are we doing there? I would say we are at very nascent stages. What do we need to improve?
(3) Unit of Account → standard numerical monetary unit of measurement of the market value of goods, services, and other transactions. How are we doing there? Well, like most non-pegged cryptos, it is likely too early to tell, and may be out of our hands completely for a while.
In short, we should always be thinking about the end user when evaluating how we are doing and what we should be building next. How useful is everything we are doing in light of actual use cases?