Zcash Thorchain Integration Grant

[aiyadt]

Hey Luke, I’m checking in to the forums since my last post, so allow me to reply to several comments you have made.

1. Native Swaps on Thorchain’s Decentralized Network:

@kayabaNerve

As one other note, can we please stop calling Thorchain native swaps?

Thanks for clarifying your perspective of atomic swaps as a definition for using the word native, but the primary notion of the word “native” in Thorchain network’s context is the fact that users get to deposit, withdraw, trade native Zcash coin and not a centralized token representing ZEC like WZEC, RenZEC as discussed earlier in this thread:

@aiyadt

Wrapped coins are IOUs and such tokens are susceptible to censorship, surveillance and blacklisting.
Native integrations open up novel implementations as any front end can use Thorchain as a backend to do swaps between various coins. Several benefits of integration with Thorchain have been shared here Zcash Thorchain Integration Grant - #56 by aiyadt

2. “a new DEX could be built instead”

There are handful of DEX that have achieved the liquidity required to be functional in the volatile crypto market. Apart from the liquidity, a DEX also needs active participants for arbitrage opportunities and returns to Liquidity Provider. Thorchain meets all the criteria and is one of the top 5 DEX’s in the ranks of dy/dx, UniSwap, etc.

@kayabaNerve

For https://twitter.com/_tm3k/status/1448165170304339968 specifically, 250k is a lot of money, when it could kickstart a new DEX on its own (though that has a whole set of feasibility issues and is not my suggestion). Furthermore, if the Thorchain narrative is of superiority and how its a gift to ZCash to even consider it, and how we should pay as much as they want for the glory of their grace, I don’t see how you expect that to go well at all. Thorchain needs projects. Projects benefit from DEXs. Projects especially benefit from what’s the top cross-chain DEX with large amounts of liquidity. They should be seen as partners.

If someone can “kickstart a new DEX on its own” for 250k, I would be happy to see it happen, Thorchain began with very humble beginnings in 2019 and took 2 years to architect and build out the network, community and liquidity.
Yes, Thorchain needs more projects to join them, and the respective projects also need the decentralized infra that Thorchain has built, for anyone can plug in and extend Thorchain front end within their own product like ShapeShift has.
And yes, Thorchain must be looked upon as a partner for this grant, they have provided us with direct access to their developers whose bandwidth is very limited and they have made themselves available whenever we needed them.

@kayabaNerve

The smallest Vultr bare metal, which I believe is the latest guide for Thorchain node setups AND the recommended option for performance, which does exceed those specifications, is $120. $120 * 5 * 4 = $2400. A quarter of the server costs asked for. If you use mainnet node specs, you pay $350 each, and hit $7000. Just by using more modern documentation $3-7.6k has been eliminated.

We will update the grant to return savings & unused cloud server billing hours at the end of the final delivery.

3. Details for the development costs have already been outlined here Zcash Thorchain Integration Grant - #65 by aiyadt

@kayabaNerve

As for “paying for value”, not for development, which was an argument paid, the original post directly contradicts this. The original post defines this as $200 an hour for development BUT with 608 hours of work (just for development). Saying this would take 608 hours is completely ridiculous. Either the developer has no idea the actual task in front of them OR they postulated the budget with misinformation about brevity in order to justify their amounts. While the amounts may be justifiable by value added, that is not the original explanation for the price.

It has been challenging to find capable, experienced developers to commit to a 12 to possible 16 week timeline for building, testing and supporting the Zcash on Thorchain integration. The grant does not specify that we would be providing support after a successful launch, but it is presumed that any Zcash specific issues with network upgrades, V5 transactions updates, debugging issues, etc. would need to be handled by the developers post launch. Zcash community benefits by adding developers and contributors.

@kayabaNerve

Since they have 3 open grants, do we really want to give another which they claim would be 2000 hours of work and have that many open projects with only a grant to maintain the wallet/servers actually complete? They do say they’re bringing on new developers, which I don’t doubt, yet it feels like ZCash is seed funding a new development company entirely without sufficient evidence at this point.

Luke, the ZcashBlockExplorer grant was completed and delivered per the update posted here Zcash Thorchain Integration Grant - #61 by aiyadt

Now, the 2 active grants of the Nighthawk Team are Milestone 3 of Nighthawk Wallet & on-going maintenance & hosting of lightwalletd.com instances. The zcashblockexplorer.com has been well received by users and we are also working with ECC to support a test-net version of the explorer which will help test Orchard Transactions and ultimately support NU5 when the network upgrades in Jan.

Both Nighthawk Wallet & lightwalletd instances have happy users and we continue maintaining, fixing wallet bugs and improving uptime for servers. The last update for Nighthawk Wallet is posted here Nighthawk Wallet Design & Development Grant - #23 by aiyadt

We are open to share the LinkedIn profiles of the new developers working on the Zcash Thorchain grant after approval and before any Milestone payment. Zcash is not seed funding a new development company. Our primary company has been operational since 2011 and serviced several Fortune 500 clients and early Bitcoin adopters, we can share its details with ZOMG. We have recently doubled down our focus to build privacy tech, preferably using Zcash.

@kayabaNerve

Beyond my overall frustrations, I’d, personally, like to see the cost of this brought down to 50-80k (potentially by removing Thorchain’s fee and by a more detailed developer timeline/server breakdown) and this put on hold over the next few months while Thorchain re-establishes itself as a player in the space worth trusting, which would also potentially give time for ZOMG to undergo reform before deciding on a rather large grant request. I’d also like to see Nighthawk continue their existing grants before even more money is put into such a pending state.

The dev hours and costs reflect the quote by the developers who will be working on this grant from start to finish. As shared in my last post, Thorchain network has started again and are on their way to launch the $THOR token in the first week of November. Everything has been working per their timeline as trackable here Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

And again, to reiterate, none of the developers working on Nighthawk Wallet would be developing on the Zcash Thorchain Grant proposal. So there is no point in blocking a parallel project.

@kayabaNerve

If you start claiming it’s by value added, unlike the original post, it’s a very different discussion. aiyadt does change their explanation on the compensation to being as such later on. I’m not entirely sure what their math is (it jumps from 25k to 9m), yet does anyone here really want to pay 100k to partner with a project which isn’t native despite all of their claims (at least, not anymore native than a CEX), has proven that despite its 30+ participants, it’ll do whatever a few people say (the developers centralizing all pending transfers out to users to their own wallet), and has actively seized user funds (anyone who didn’t fill out a Google form asking for personal information/was arbitrarily judged as malicious) without proving technical competence?

The estimate of $25k worth of ZEC trading daily came from the pre-July trading numbers for LTC which has a similar trading volume on CEX & Thorchain. Multiple 25k x 365 days and you get $9M+ annual volume, which I consider to be on the lowest spectrum as with the increase in size of the Thorchain community and increase in interest in DeFi from institutional players(even Cathie Wood recently mentioned how DeFi loans and interest rates have started to make a dent in the traditional banking business), I am expecting much larger volumes for Zcash on a DEX.
And again, the swaps happening on Thorchain enable users to transact in native coins and pay the fess from the native coin too. Your definition of Thorchain not being atomic swaps does not reduce the value proposition of Thorchain.

@kayabaNerve

In the end though, this is a far too long dump of all my opinions on a topic I’ve probably already commented too much on. I’m not part of ZOMG and the decision doesn’t lie with me. I also have no where near the reputation in this community as other users do. That said, I do believe I’m quite knowledgeable about Thorchain, and hope I’ve properly laid out the series of counter claims. I hope the best decision is made, even if I’m wrong.

Thanks for your critique.

There is no need to further delay this grant as we are just delaying/disenfranchising early adopters(from the world of DEX) from taking part in the growth of Zcash from here on.
The market needs a native ZEC swap functionality on a DEX with high liquidity, and large Zcash holders want a way to earn an APY on their holdings.

The opportunity cost for ZEC also needs to be considered, Monero has been eyeing native integration with Thorchain too, and since Monero is a competitor to the privacy rhetoric, it would be a good step if Zcash can reach the Thorchain community as the first privacy coin before XMR. Additionally, there are synergies between Thorchain & Zcash with Naomi recently bringing them up on Fox News https://youtu.be/YVW-JuvYPgo?t=172

@kayabaNerve

I do hear that LPs have yet to be fully paid back, so I’d like to wait a bit longer, and one of those tweets discuss supply centralization which is a fascinating discussion.

Let me get back to you on the latest status on the LPs being refunded, for now, see:
https://twitter.com/THORmaximalist/status/1452401345902878730?t=Gc3N7Hxi2OyFZvIfNxIdbQ&s=09

@kayabaNerve

They also refer to a 180m RUNE wallet which… doesn’t exist.

There is a fund raising for Thorchain’s IDO happening on the first of November.

https://www.runebase.org/news/thorswap-ido-launches-november-1st

@kayabaNerve

Mind if I ask if you had any further thoughts on shielded ZEC?

Shielded ZEC is a no-brainer as a store of value, but the transactions made to third parties can be made public by the third party, so it would make sense to keep things simple with T-address only support while Zcash wallets like Nighthawk allow receiving of ZEC in T-addrs and shielding them.

Please read my replies earlier the thread for how there are no reusable code in the context for Zcash tests which are required for deployment. And the fixes that are applied to every similar project applied in PRs apply to Thorchain specific code.

@aiyadt

here are some issues with Z-addrs focussed implementation:

1. Implementation can suffer inability of extendability as Thorchain Router software is continuously evolving to avoid 0-days & attack vectors as the xchainjs code exclusively scans multiple public explorer APIs for confirmations and public data to settle trades.
2. Confusion for users & traders alike: recently, a community member had a bad experience with Bitpanda where the pass through service did not like Shielded origins of the transaction. We would prefer avoiding such an issue where a new user withdraws funds from an exchange or wallet and fumbles around shielding/deshielding aspects. Crashed transaction from t-address to t-address
3. In the Zcash community, we realize that Privacy does not come in transit, but in Storage . And I agree with Zooko’s point that shielding of funds should happen at the wallet/storage side, and especially not in a cross-blockchain transactional side.
4. A specially engineered proof-of-concept Z-addrs implementation would be dead on arrival as Unified Address go live in Q1 next year, and we really wouldn’t want new users to Zcash be super confused with T-addrs, Z-addrs(Sapling) and UAs(that contain T-addrs + Orchard Shielded addrs).

Ideally, we expect Thorchain users fund, provide liquidity and trade in transparent ZEC and withdraw their coins to their wallets’ T-addrs which will Auto-Shield them to the latest Shielded pool, per the Shielded-by-Default initiative. New releases to help enable Zcash Shielded by Default - Electric Coin Company

@ZcashGrants It has been a month since @Souptacular invited more members of the Zcash Community to comment on the updated schedule and costs. And we have had several discussions since then and the synergy has even been mentioned on Fox Business News. The user base believes Zcash integration with Thorchain is very vital for ZEC to keep up with the demands of the DeFi space.

The user base wants an answer on this initiative, can we have an answer for the grant proposal?
And if someone else would like to volunteer and finish this proposal for $80k, I am ready for a Knowledge Transfer of the work done till now because I see so much value in this integration. And as a ZEC holder, I believe in a Dev fund that can get proposals like these done.