The Zcash Foundation's Strategy

[Dodger]

@dontbeevil

Thanks @Dodger for putting this up for community.

1. I would like to see ZF’s sole focus to be everything about Zcash — currency, network, protocol & community. Ideally the mission statement for ZF looks like this:

The Foundation’s mission is to be a public charity dedicated to serving the users of the Zcash protocol and blockchain.

instead of

@Dodger

The Foundation’s mission is to be a public charity dedicated to building Internet payment and privacy infrastructure for the public good, primarily serving the users of the Zcash protocol and blockchain.

Our mission statement is based on the Description of Activities attached to our form 1023 application for 501(c)(3) non-profit status. More context can be found in this blog post.

You may find it informative to compare our form 1023 with that of ECC’s parent organisation, the Bootstrap Project.

@dontbeevil

2. What percent of dev resources are currently directed at Zebrad?

We don’t have a precise percentage number for that but I’d estimate it at >80%.
You can find an overview of our spending broken down by program in our transparency reports. For example, here’s the breakdown for Q4 2021:

@dontbeevil

3. At which point do you think dev resources will be diverted to other efforts?

I hope that Zebra will start to approach feature parity with zcashd by Q1 2023, at which point we’ll start exploring adding new features and functionality. However, I expect that Zebra will be the default underlying platform for such work.

Outside of Zebra, we’ll continue to work towards getting FROST ready for adoption by wallets, exchanges and custodians.

@dontbeevil

4. How high is programmability in the list of priorities? It’s not clear what ZF is going to tackle in the near term, at-least for 2022.

Programmability is a long-term priority. For 2022, we’re focused on Zebra and FROST.

@dontbeevil

5. Any plans for ZEC Wallet?

We did have plans to put out an RFP after NU5 activates, for a team to take over the ZecWallet project from @adityapk00.

However, we’ve had put those plans on hold pending resolution of the questions and uncertainty around license compatibility that have been raised by ECC’s adoption of the BOSL license for Orchard.

See my post in the BOSL or MIT thread for more context,

@dontbeevil

6. Can ZF be more hands on with Ledger shielded support?

We’ve been talking with Zondax about implementing Ledger support for Sapling transactions in Zecwallet Lite.

@dontbeevil

7. What plans does ZF have to onboard new users to Zcash & bring growth to shielded transactions?

Let me ask you a couple of questions.

Firstly, do you think that ZecWallet helped onboard new users to Zcash and bring growth to shielded transactions?

Secondly, what more do you think ZF should be doing?