Hi Zeeps!
Last week, Elon announced Telsa’s roadmap, which included plans to sell you a cute little guy for your home. For somewhere between $20 - $30k, we will be able to get our own “Optimus buddy” to do our dishes, zap off our unwanted hair, and play board games with our kids so that we can focus on the important stuff. And to make it even better, Elon claims (1:39) that there is an 80% probability that it won’t include a Tesla self-directing AI that lasers off your face and steals your Dogecoin while you sleep.
Sign me up! I mean, what could go wrong? And if these robots are as intelligent as it seems like they’ll be, they’ll most likely be Zcashers and our new Zashi buddies. A man can dream, right?
Not to be outdone, today, ECC released its Q4 2024 updated roadmap for Zashi and Zcash.
Every quarter, the ECC team reviews our performance from the previous quarter, re-evaluates our priorities, and refactors our plans for the quarters ahead. As you can imagine, the upcoming quarter is the clearest, and things get a bit fuzzier the further we look. Here’s the refactored quarterly roadmap for Zashi and our work on Zcash. The full PDF is up on the ECC website.
For Zashi, we’re finishing up version 1.x this quarter with several features, including Flexa integration, address rotation, and Spanish localization. Version 1.2.1 for iOS will be available Monday and includes an address book, a cool new receive ZEC feature, and bug fixes.
The major features planned for Zashi 2.x are Keystone hardware wallet integration, multi-account support, and liberated payments. I have been waiting for a hardware wallet to support shielded addresses since Zcash launched. I can’t wait!
Of course, Zashi will need to support multiple accounts so that you can use different wallets for saving and spending your ZEC. Liberated payments are also something we’ve been talking about for some time. This will allow you to give ZEC to a friend or tip your hairdresser with ZEC, even if they don’t yet have Zashi installed.
While we’re working on that, we will conduct market research and explore the viability of a Zashi Vault product. The idea is that we can unlock a richer feature set in a desktop version of the Zashi over time without cluttering the simple, easy-to-use Zashi mobile experience. We also want to explore whether there is a market for white glove services such as supported MPC account recovery and priority support. What is shown in the roadmap are simply potential areas of exploration.
We plan to start planning for Zashi 3.x after the first of the year, emphasizing swaps and the potential for multicurrency support in anticipation of Zash Shielded Assets (ZSAs).
Our roadmap for Zcash is largely focused on our team’s contribution to the ecosystem and may not fully reflect the contributions and plans of others.
NU6 is set to activate in late November. Based on Qedit’s timelines, we have assumed that NU7 will be ZSA-focused, but this is subject to change based on community consensus.
ECC engineering efforts will heavily focus on features and activities in support of zcashd deprecation in collaboration with the Zcash Foundation, the Zingo! team, @pacu, and others in the ecosystem ahead of NU7, as ZSAs will not be supported in zcashd.
It is noted that Shielded Labs is advocating for the Network Sustainability Mechanism to be implemented ahead of zcashd deprecation. While that decision is in the hands of the community, I don’t believe we should rush to include it as I don’t think there has been sufficient community debate on the pros and cons, or clarity on whether the community wants the change and if it should be prioritized over other things. ECC’s plan does not include any time to support the change in zcashd, with audits or an ecosystem rollout. If the community wishes to proceed, great! But all work must be accomplished by Shielded Labs and/or others.
Our Zcash R&D efforts during the months ahead include short and long-term performance and scalability improvements to the protocol, support for third-party efforts, including Keystone and Brave, and improvements needed for Zashi and other wallets. In conjunction with anticipated Zcash governance and funding conversations, we also plan to collaborate with the Zcash Foundation and the broader community on a disbursement mechanism for the lockbox that activates in NU6.
We’re grateful for all the community input and feedback on our planning and efforts this year. Our next roadmap refactoring will occur in January at the next Z|ECC summit. We’re investigating locations and leaning toward a Central or South American venue. Z|ECC summits are open to Zcash community contributors. More information on how you can apply to participate will be available in the coming weeks.
Here’s what your buddies at ECC were up to this week:
Zashi
Design
- Continuing Transaction History redesign - implementing feedback from team review
- Progressing with Onboarding redesign
- Updated the splash screen design to allow for authentication on app launch
iOS
Unique Installs: 3.59k
Total Downloads: 4.24k
Rating: 4.9 ★
- Version 1.2.1 for iOS will be available Monday and includes an address book, a cool new receive ZEC feature, and bug fixes
- Send Feedback screen implemented + fallback to scenarios when users don’t have Apple email app setup
- Flexa:
- Initialization moved to the point when users truly need/want it
- A biometric check was added to confirm a payment
- Feature Flagging system implemented, Flexa code is the first instance merged
- SplashScreen enhanced to act as a biometric checkpoint for app launch and app foregrounds (ask again after 15 minutes)
- Working on adding an address to the memo for easy Reply-to
Android
Total Install Base: 2.16k
Total Installs (incl. Open Beta): 7.69k
Rating: 4.7 ★
- Redesigned/Unified buttons and paddings across the whole app based on the new Design System
- Updated Zashi’s Welcome screen background
- Added new Integrations screen to the Settings
- Working on Address Book with remote storage using Google Drive
- Debugged and prepared a fix for a bug with “BadBlockHeight” blocking syncing in cooperation with the Core Team - to be tested with affected users
- Fixed “unsupported address type” issue blocking syncing
- Fixed a crash on lower Android versions caused by the ZIP 321 library
- Working on the Request ZEC flow
Zcash Core
- librustzcash
- Completed zcash_client_backend: Implement note management via change splitting (librustzcash#1579)
- Migrated zcash_client_sqlite to schemerz (librustzcash#1575).
- Work on the Schemerz database schema migration library
- Figured out a ~2× improvement to finalization latency for Crosslink 2
- Progress on PCZT (partially constructed Zcash transaction) format in support of Keystone
- Reviewed and commented on Shielded Labs’ proposed ZIPs for NSM
- Zashi localization support
- Debugging and fixes for Android-related issues
Other
Brave is still cranking! The shielded wallet code will be audited in late October, and they are still working on implementing the full transaction history. It will then move into beta for four weeks before being pushed into production. They are also continuing to work on adding FIL storage to the memo field, which will be launched later.
Some of the team met with NYM to review the current state and potential for integration with Zashi. While much is done, we have some concerns about adding latency, especially while syncing. We will explore this further in the coming months.
We plan to hire another core team member and are drafting the job description. This person will primarily focus on Zashi-related needs and developer ecosystem support.
I had previously planned to attend and speak at Devcon next month. I canceled my trip due to a heavy travel load, my desire to continue to focus on delivery, and anticipated funding and governance discussions coming soon. I will be in DC late next week to speak at the DC Privacy Summit. If you are in town, let me know.
Speaking of governance, @daira, @decentralistdan, @aquietinvestor, and I met with Justine (she’s awesome), who heads governance for the Optimism Foundation, to learn more about the current state of governance, their objectives, and lessons learned. She’s plugging me into some other communities and resources. I’ll share more on that soon.
We caught up with Radom and Raise about the progress toward adding support for Zcash. Raise is ready to go, but Radom’s development team has been backed up. We’re hoping to get an updated timeline as early as next week.
I have been in contact with Mercado Bitcoin about adding Zcash support. They have a proposal that includes payment for various marketing activities. I’ll evaluate it next week, but it’s not likely something we can afford. If anyone from ZCG is interested in taking a look, I have permission to share the information with you.
We’re seeing some nice moves in the market Zeeps!
Building for the humans today and the robots of tomorrow.
Onward.