I’m not a NASCAR fan, but the phrase “trading paint” came to mind when I was testing the new swap capability we are building in Zashi, leveraging NEAR Intents to swap shielded ZEC to SOL with just a few clicks and a minute or two of time. “Trading paint” isn’t just a collision between two forces; it’s contact with intention and purpose.
While swaps for most tokens are generally functional in crypto, this one feels like magic. It’s not just a swapping of two independent coins; it’s an overlap of logos representing different but complementary perspectives, missions, and communities. We are bringing things together on the canvas of a new Internet, one that allows us to control our finances freely.
One experimental feature we are delivering with NEAR Intents is “Pay.” This will allow Zashi users to specify the exact amount the coin recipient will receive, regardless of slippage and fees. We’re wrapping up development and testing and hope to have all this out to you by the end of July.
We are also adding Maya DEX integration in the near future. The Maya team has been highly involved in the Zcash ecosystem, engaging on X and participating in ZconVI and ECC’s 3rd Z|ECC Summit earlier this year. Fearless and with deep conviction, they recently added support for ZEC and have seen rapid growth in liquidity, despite limited UX options to date. Soon, Zashi users will have another choice for easily swapping in and out of ZEC..
After that, we are considering adding a native stablecoin or two in the Zashi wallet ahead of further multicurrency support when Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs) become available. We’d love your feedback on that and other priorities through the Zashi survey we released this week.
We’re also trading paint at the Z|ECC Summit the week of July 8th. Ten different organizations in the Zcash ecosystem will come together for dialogue, learning, and joint planning. NEAR is part of that group. A key objective is to develop a high-level joint roadmap for Zcash’s action-packed next 18 months. This will be a first!
We are in the midst of a new era of Zcash, one with a world-class user experience and newly unlocked possibilities. For technical and regulatory reasons, shielded Zcash has long lived on its own island. Not anymore. We are quickly building toward a future where shielded Zcash will be universally available to everyone and used for a myriad of purposes, including peer-to-peer and agent-based payments, financial management, and yield maximization. We’re not doing this alone. It’s too big a task. Within the Zcash community and across the broader crypto ecosystem, we’re trading paint.
Note: I will likely be unable to post an update next week due to travel and activities ahead of the summit. I think this will be the first week in a year and a half that I haven’t posted one of these updates. If you are still reading them, thank you. I’ll see you on the other side of the summit!
Here’s ECC’s artistry on Zcash this week:
Zashi
Please help us build the Zashi you want to see in the world. Take the survey!
What we did:
- Released Zashi 2.0.4 with bug fixes and a few improvements
- Swap or Pay with NEAR: development on Android and iOS. The first working version shipped for internal testing on iOS
What’s up next:
- Continued Swap or Pay with NEAR development and bug fixes.
- Android SDK release migration (deadline at the end of the month)
- Implementation of opt-in/opt-out feature for Tor
iOS Analytics
- Unique Installs: 8.45k
- Total Downloads: 10.2k
- AppStore Rating: 4.9*
Android Analytics
- Unique Installs: 3.78k
- Total Downloads: 19.7k
- PlayStore Rating: 4.383*
Zcash Core
What we did:
- We began work on P2SH support needed for NU6.1 lockbox distributions.
- We designed & began implementation of a feature deprecation framework for zallet. As part of this, we also did a bunch of work on zallet configuration in preparation for an alpha release, hopefully next week.
- We held design meetings with the Zingo engineers to continue improving the design of Zaino APIs for Zallet.
- We updated zallet to improve how we handle the chain tip advancing.
- We released zcash_client_sqlite versions 0.16.3 and 0.17.1 to fix a bug related to the handling of transparent coinbase outputs.
- In testing Zallet, we discovered an existing bug in the zcashd RPC api related to missing orchard handling; that bug has now been fixed.
- Lots of code review! We’ve had a number of outstanding pull requests across the ECC stack that had been languishing; many of those have now been merged.
- We continued work on full-block scanning support in zcash_client_backend.
What’s up next:
- Complete the integration of zcashd wallet.dat import into zallet.
- Add transparent output information to z_listunspent in zallet
- Zallet alpha release!
Other
Held the monthly PGP meeting and attended Reserve Protocol’s Monetarium 2 conference.
We finalized the agenda and session leaders for the Z|ECC Summit. The format is structured to allow for ample room for unstructured conversations during mornings, lunch, and evenings. The ECC team will meet on Monday and Thursday for team planning. The community sessions are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday. The agenda for those two days is below. We’ll share plenty of content and outcomes following the summit.
That’s all for this week.
Painting outside the lines,
Onward.