Zcash Developer Relations Engineer

Community Grants
2

(continued)

Proposed Solution: Describe the solution at a high level.

Please be specific about who the users and stakeholders are and how they would interact with your solution. E.g. retail ZEC holders, Zcash core devs, wallet devs, DeFi users, potential Zcash community participants

The section above describes the overall picture that led me to write this grant proposal. Although it does not cover them all. Resolving these issues would require more than a single person. Hence, I propose an initial step towards addressing these points that is more suited to the current market conditions, that is more focused on delivering specific and tangible value quickly to the developer community.

I propose to continue in the role of a Zcash Wallet Community Developer that can work to fill in the gaps on the different wallet teams and their articulation within the Zcash ecosystem. This would be a full-time role split between different tasks that support the Zcash Wallet Developer teams and the community.

  • Wallet Development and Testing
    • Part-time Wallet development for the different Zcash teams
    • Provide wallet related Code Reviews
    • Developing general-purpose wallet integration testing tooling
  • Ecosystem Outreach
    • Moderate, expand and steer Light Client Working Group
    • Attend Arborist Calls and the Zcash Ecosystem Spaces
    • Office Hours of Technical support to Dev Teams requesting Grants or proposing RFPs
    • Attend conferences and other events that are relevant to the role (funding will be evaluated independently with ZGC and ZF with different grants if more funds needed)
  • Collaboration with ZCG
    • Consulting sessions with ZGC on RFP or grant proposals
    • RFP drafting and assessment

Zcash wallet ecosystem development forecast for 2024 Q2-Q4

The following list contains most of the themes/tasks/efforts that I’ve been able to track that are relevant to ZWCD’s role for 2024. This list is currently changing and evolving as our ecosystem does, so it should not be considered exhaustive or definitive.

List 1: Development projects that are currently ongoing, continuing on, or starting in 2024

  • Wallet developer ecosystem response to Exchanges announcing delistings
    • Note: this is a “developing story”. In which capacity ZWCD will be involved depends on the outcome of the solution requirement analysis itself.
    • encumbers a collective effort from all developers from Core to each one wallets that support Shielded Zcash.
    • ZIP specification for the solution that will be developed
    • Development of the solution on the wallet level
    • Coordination of the many teams involved and the Exchange counterparts.
  • The Zeebot and Workshops
    • Shall ZCWD be there? Yes
    • Do we know where is it and when? Not yet! But somewhere on Earth and around the end of January, beginning of February 2024.
  • ZconV:
    • Shall ZCWD be there? Yes
    • Do we know where is it? Yes! Everywhere!
    • We are preparing great things!
  • ZIP-321 request adoption:
    • Integration of ZIP-321 libraries into native mobile wallets.
    • Development of kotlin multi-platform target for Javascript clients (JS SDK, Brave and react-native clients)
  • FROST: (ongoing)
  • Decentralizing Core:
    • [Tentative] Sunsetting GoLang Lightwalletd in favor of Zebra integration in RustLang
    • Regtest and other testing tooling Support for Zebra and its integration with wallets
  • Tooling:
    • Regtest Support of Mobile SDKs (ongoing)
  • “Vanilla” ZSAs
    • Development, wallet integration, tooling and documentation
  • ZAVAX Bridge support
    • Development, tooling and wallet integration
    • Design Review
  • Hardware Wallet (ledger) Support other wallets
    • Integration to other wallets besides Zondax’s ZecWallet version
  • DAGSync and other wallet ecosystem improvements
    • R+D of better sync or (no sync at all solutions)
  • ZEC In the Browser:
    • Brave Wallet Support
    • ZcashSDK for Javascript
    • FROST integration for ZEC in the Browser
  • ZEC to PoS:
    • Wallet implications of Zcash moving to Proof of Stake
  • Draft a ZIP to define Mortem and Post Mortem best practices for wallets:
    • This is a totally undesirable ZIP but someone has to do it. It can’t happen that a wallet is no longer maintained and that Zodlers are left hanging to dry.
    • Research what other projects do in this matter
    • Collect best practices and case studies
    • Draft a document that instruct wallet developers how to deal with:
      • Communications of End of Support / End of Life of a Zcash wallet
      • Common migrations paths
      • Suggested timelines
      • Pre-mortem, Mortem and Post Mortem support
      • Tombstone releases

Solution Format: What is the exact form of the final deliverable you’re creating?

E.g. code shipped within the zcashd and zebra code bases, a website, a feature within a wallet, a text/markdown file, user manuals, etc.

Similarly to the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead, the deliverables will be established on a monthly basis, agreed between the involved teams and ZCG, then informed to the whole community.

I have contacted many teams within the Zcash ecosystem like ZF, ECC, Zingo Labs, Nighthawk Apps and Red Dev to have a rough estimate on things that I could continue to contribute to if I remained within this role that ended in December and continued from January to November 2024.

There are many projects and initiatives in flight in our ecosystem. Many of them depend on one or more teams. I have made an effort to attempt to forecast this work and outlined it in the Schedule and Milestones sections.

The outline is right in the spirit of most of the detailed tasks, but it will have to be refined and specified as-we-go, since all of these are moving pieces within a complex distributed, decentralized and global ecosystem like ours. Also I’m considering the case of new teams arriving (Yay!) and applying for grants and serving them as a welcoming person of reference with Office Hours and other meetings. Also I believe that newcomers should be prioritized if they need guidance to foster a broader community.

The initial grant application covered 3 months of full-time work from January 15th to April 15th 2024, which then was extended to Q2 2024 with the possibility to extend to the whole year 2024. This presentation is the extension of that follow-up grant through 2024 until the end of ZIP-1014, plus some tweaks based on the experience I’ve collected these past months.

Technical Approach: Dive into the how of your project.

My methodology has been similar to a Staff member of the teams I contribute to, where they would hand me well scoped tasks over their github repositories or other public means that the Zcash community or anyone can oversee. I’ve also been interacting more over community channels like the forums and R&D discord to communicate with other teams as needed.

Work dynamic will be similar to the one of the previous Grant with some changes due to the nature of the work that needs to be carried out.

What has changed over the last 5 or 6 months?

Well.. basically pretty much everything! And that’s really good for Zcash!

The main difference I foresee in terms of this grant is that when previously we had well defined tasks in terms of scope and time based on things that were previously developed and needed to be made, wrapped up or extended, we now have

  • Ecosystem responses that are either time-sensitive with tight deadlines like the “avoid delisting initiative”
  • Ongoing initiatives that have high-impact on the wallet ecosystem and would require collaboration and support from ZWCD but they mainly depend mainly on other teams:
    • FROST
    • ZSAs
    • PoS
    • HW wallet support
    • Bridges w/ other Coins (Maya Protocol and ZAVAX bridge)
    • NU6 and Non-Direct Funding Model implementation
  • Initiatives that solely depend on ZWCD:
    • Tooling development
    • Library and SDK development and maintenance
    • Community Activities
      • LCWG and Office Hours

For this, the milestones would be structured in terms of main and secondary tasks. The main task will be the one that will be the most important and would take precedence before the rest of the items of the milestone unless there’s a blocker that makes it not fruitful to be worked on and the time would be better spent on something else.

List 1 can serve as a Backlog of possible tasks that ZWCD will contribute to advancing on its own or by supporting other teams leading them to avoid either being “blocked” or acting as “bottleneck” given the current “single-person” nature of the role.
Example:

Milestone X:

  • Main: Task A, Ongoing, long thing that depends on Team Q delivering some API.
  • Secondary: Task B

Milestone X+1:

  • Main: Task A, Ongoing, long thing that depends on Team Q delivering some API.
  • Secondary: Task C

Milestone X+2:

  • Main: Task D, a task depending on Team R
  • Secondary: Task C

If the main task is blocked by the time Milestone X is underway, the work could be swapped like this:

Milestone X:

  • Main: Task B
  • Secondary: Task C

Milestone X+1:

  • Main: Task A, Ongoing, long thing that depends on Team Q delivering some API.
  • Secondary:

Milestone X+2:

  • Main: Task D, a task depending on Team R
  • Secondary: Some other task with no deps.

This reflects how ZCG and myself agreed on managing emerging blockers and priority changes that naturally happen in decentralized and distributed software engineering projects like Zcash. Managing a pool of possible tasks avoids being in a “deadlock” that would make the grant progress to be stalled by dependencies in other projects.

Dependencies: What external entities is your project dependent on? What involvement is required from ZF, ECC, and/or other external organizations? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?

The nature of the work done should not need any further integrations beyond having my PRs accepted by the organizations I’m helping. It wouldn’t require involvement from ECC or ZF besides their regular business as usual community outreach.
I would need special involvement from ZF to set up some administrative things like calendars or Conference Call Venues for LCWG.

Execution risks: What obstacles do you expect? What is most likely to go wrong? Which unknown factors could jeopardize success? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?

Risk: One risk could be that the workload is too much for a single person and that I’m spread too thin to be effective.

Mitigation: During this (hopefully if the community wants so) first half of the grant, it has been the case that some milestones were too varied and I noticed I suffered a lot from context switching. I’ve come to manage it, but for this following chapter I will try to be more dedicated to a main objective within one (or more) milestone, and a secondary one. This will not only help me be more effective but also be more present with the teams I’m committing to work with.

Risk: The opposite would be that teams can’t organize to delegate manageable pieces of work that I can deliver without causing them more overhead than the off-load that would mean that I could take on those tasks for them. Adding people to teams does mean that they have to dedicate some time to accommodate the new team members so they can be productive and on par with the rest of the team.

Mitigation: A way to help avoid this risk would be to create such onboarding processes as part of my work so they can use those processes for augmenting their teams and onboarding new team members or receiving open source contributions from independent developers. An example of this could be how Zingo Viridians and I worked together in shaping up darksidewalletd integration tests. The datasets and tests I worked on were documented in a way that they would be helpful for the team to keep working on them as if one of the Viridians had worked on that and not some external person. Also being my work for “general purpose” it included documentation and examples that internal development wouldn’t invest on.

Risk: Teams depended on are “off schedule” -that being late or early- in terms of the milestone forecast

Mitigation: This has happened in the past part of the grant. And ZCG and I could resolve this by anticipating work of future milestones or bringing in other work that was not originally included in the grant but that it was found to be of importance for the ecosystem. I have also worked with teams to define, scope and delimit the work I’ll be performing with them, and will continue to do so, to be fair to all teams I’m collaborating with. As it was done previously when needed, any deviations from the estimations that might affect my milestones, will be brought up to ZCG for advice.

Unintended Consequences: What are the negative ramifications if your project is successful? Consider usability, stability, privacy, integrity, availability, decentralization, interoperability, maintainability, technical debt, requisite education, etc

An unintended consequence could be that the role becomes a single point of failure or a centralization point. The focus of this role should be supporting and empowering teams to align their particular developments with the interest of the general Zcash developer community and grow this role into a team of people that can outlive the interest of a single person.

Evaluation plan: What metrics for success will you share with the community once you’re done? In addition to quantitative metrics, what qualitative metrics will you commit to report?

It would be a mix between completed pull requests and feedback from the development teams that require my services as community developer. Quoting the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead grant proposal, Zcash community project developers should be asked how useful my outreach and support has been, and they should rate me as helpful, polite, and be willing to recommend working with me to other Zcash projects.

Compensation total budget / total proposed USD value of grant:

Total Request: 75000 USD

Please provide justification for the total compensation budget:

I’ve averaged the annualized compensation of a principal software engineer

Total Request: 75000 USD (5 milestones)

Startup funding:

0 USD

August 30th: (assumes progress approval)
15,000 USD

September 31st: (assumes progress approval)
15,000 USD

October 31st: (assumes progress approval)
15,000 USD

November 30th: (assumes progress approval)
15,000 USD

December 30th: (assumes progress approval)
15,000 USD

Schedule and Milestones: What is your timeline for the project? Include concrete milestones and the major tasks required to complete each milestone:

Do you require startup funding?

No.

The proposal entails providing community support and sustaining a presence within the ecosystem to build up and strengthen the role. Since some activities could consume the whole time allocation they will be time-boxed to estimate their impact in the overall schedule and milestones.

Time-boxed Activity time slot (hours/month)
Arborist call (two bi-weekly) 3
Light Client working group (two bi-weekly calls + administrative) ~6
LCWG Initiatives Lead ~3
Community Forums (depending on activity) ~6
R&D Discord (depending on activity) ~6
Office Hours (per request but in fixed scheduled) 8 hours
Pull Request Reviews ~6
Maintain Existing Repositories ~10
total 15 to 45 hours

I spoke with the different Zcash Development teams about their upcoming timelines and development support needs. I also factored in known seasonal elements and recent ecosystem announcements, like Grant updates from RedDev on the Zavax Bridge from ECC to create this “grocery shopping list” of possible milestones.

These are subject to change given the long term nature of the grant and the many dependencies.

As it was stated before, the different milestones will vary depending on the teams’ priorities and other teams like ECC, Zingo, Red Dev, Ywallet or ZC Grantees requesting additional support. As it has been done in the previous grant, this situation has been anticipated and ZCG, myself and the different involved teams have worked to make the best use of my full dedication to Zcash development.

  • Milestone 1: (Aug 2024)
    • Main:
      • ZSAs
      • Frost 2.0.0 adoption on Frost-UniFFI-sdk
      • Detach Transaction Creation from Signature on Librustzcash (ongoing)
      • Orchard Support for FROST SDK (wrap up)
    • Secondary:
      • Support Zingo and Represent Zcash at Crecimiento summit in Buenos Aires
      • NDFM R&D
    • Fixed time-boxed Allocations (see table)
  • Milestone 2: (Sep 2024)
    • Main:
      • Detach Transaction Creation from Signature on Librustzcash (continued)
      • Hardware Wallet (ledger) Support other wallets (cont’d)
    • Secondary:
      • Repair Darksidewalletd tests for Mobile SDK
      • NDFM R&D
    • Fixed time-boxed Allocations (see table)
  • Milestone 3: (Oct 2024)
    • Main:
      • FROST Signature mobile PoC
      • Hardware Wallet (ledger) Support other wallets (cont’d)
      • NDFM R&D
    • Secondary:
      • ZavaX Bridge Support
      • Attend Avalanche Summit in Buenos Aires
    • Fixed time-boxed Allocations (see table)
  • Milestone 4: (Nov 2024)
    • Main:
      • NDFM R&D
      • FROST Signature mobile PoC
      • Hardware Wallet (ledger) Support other wallets (cont’d)
    • Secondary:
      • Repair Darksidewalletd tests for Mobile SDK
    • Fixed time-boxed Allocations (see table)
  • Milestone 5: (Dec 2024)
    • Main:
      • NDFM R&D
      • Repair Darksidewalletd tests for Mobile SDK
      • FROST Signature mobile PoC
    • Fixed time-boxed Allocations (see table)
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Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 8/5/2024
Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 8/19/2024