Ye thought so…
What’s the status of this project? I’m a little disappointed in the lack of adoption of it. Zcash in general could greatly benefit from a homogenized design system/creative direction. It’s clear that there are no UI focused people working directly for the compan(?:y|ies).
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I am ready to contribute, just waiting on the team, seems they lack a clear direction as to what to do.
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What is your area of expertise?
Ah, yes. The “Marketing ZEC talk” from the “Electric Coin Company” who checks notes after a failed NFT launch, is now selling t-shirts:
Theres all kinds of Zcash merch stuff, whats the privacy is normal shirt got to do with the cypherpunk zero project?
Nothing! But you wouldn’t know that if you were following their North Star manifesto… da dum tis
In all seriousness, my feelings as of late have been a test of my patience as someone who has cheerled and told my IRL friends about Zcash for years.
It was cumbersome to use back then, and it’s cumbersome now. Wallets are broken, people are confused, and price go down. Grug not happy.
The new car smell is beginning to fade away and the project is in this weird adolescence phase. Some of the original cast members are still on, but all the extras are being phased out, and slowly the OGs start to leave and do their own thing (dYdX, et al). Next thing you know, you’ve created Home Alone 4: Taking Back The House.
The project desperately needs a strong direction. I’ve worked at startups under 100 people that have went on to become publicly traded, and at some point you need to bring in a fresher/different perspective. The entire project has no cohesion. It’s not “slick” in the slightest sense.
It seems Zcash could benefit from actually listening to their community more. Steve from the ECC mentioned recently that he only did light testing of @hanh’s YWallet. How can you design a world-class experience ™ as part of your North Star ™ if you aren’t obsessing over what people have built on your platform? For the record, I support @hanh’s ZCG proposal but that’s just a side note.
The “Privacy is Normal” meme campaign feels a bit try-hard. For one, it’s 6 syllables so try saying that 5x fast. It isn’t actionable: “Privacy is Normal so watch our 10 video explainers on YouTube about it”. And it’s like random tweets from people at the ECC about it with a Stay Tuned ™ disclaimer next to it. Like is this a senior project or a world class monetary platform?
How about relaxing the trademarks a bit so people don’t have to jump through hoops to create and sell some Zcash art. It might even help adoption and signal that the community has some sort of voice.
And as for the “Cypherpunk NFT”, it was launched at a terrible time, there was unnecessary public drama between the two controlling entities of the family-secret recipe trademark (are you noticing a pattern, yet?), and it’s yet another way to trap Zcash coin holders (that @valkenburgh seems to not think much of) into a useless piece of art (not even designed in-house) that you couldn’t even sell if you wanted to (due to low volume).
I don’t know if it’s negligence or intentional (sometimes I lean towards the latter) that this project trips on itself all the time.
Even though EOS Is garbage, it’s interesting to watch what they are doing by distancing themselves from Block One. The Foundation, the ECC, and ZCG all going in different directions (some good, some bad) but no one is really steering the ship.
It’d be amazing at this point if they were to figure it out. If it happens and Zcash hits its ATH in price within the next 2 years, I will eat crow (metaphorically, of course since I like the actual birds).
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Growing pains I’d say and they’re only amplified by the amount of development and activity that ensues. There’s like 2 dozen important projects or discussions going on at any given time and yeah it’s hard to wrangle it all in sometimes. It can feel non-cohesive sometimes but beyond maybe helping facilitate better communication between projects and developers somehow I’m not sure what else to do there or what that might even attempt to accomplish. Don’t freak out just because of a hiccup in the wallets that now has 100% of the ECC’s dev focus. Zfnd does zebrad but if you read up the git commits you’ll see they’re dealing with the same issues as well. I’m dealing with same issues on my main node. I’ve been here for a while now too so I understand your frustrations. I’ve certainly gone on a tirade or two around here in the past and it’s healthy to let it out sometimes right? But these are people and weaving metaphorical tapestries that might cut deeper than you think is just too easy on the internet. I’m sure they understand but try to relax a little and buck up!
I agree with much of what you said.
UI designer.
The front-end library itself is already usable for React projects, but before spending much time on developer outreach, especially for existing Zcash apps/websites to integrate it, I want some full-featured apps to be live and actively used first such as a more feature-complete ZPublish website, etc; once that is done, I’ll polish up the documentation, Sketch design system, etc and work on outreach to new/existing designers and developers. Am currently working on back-end infrastructure for Elemental Pay and ZPublish (database, cache and light RPC listening infrastructure for scaling which is a bit finicky/time consuming to work on).
I’ve been in touch with some Zcash app developers and am keen on integrating the library/design system to projects upstream once it’s been battle-tested a bit and is more stable.
I’d love to take some time to chat to any designers/developers that would like to experiment with some Zcash UI/UX with the component library: please reach out to me.
Would we be able to get grants for doing so?