Zcash Thorchain Integration Grant

[aiyadt]

Thank you @ZcashGrants & @holmesworcester for reviewing the grant proposal and writing up all the questions & concerns, please find my replies below.

To start, I would request you to watch a video by Naomi Brockwell on the need for a DEX The End of Centralized Exchanges: THORchain - YouTube

@holmesworcester

1. Can you give us—and other community members here—a clearer picture of what the end user experience will be for buying Zcash from, say, BTC or ETH once this grant is completed? Probably the best way to do this would be a screencast, but a walkthrough with a series of steps and screenshots would work too! If there are different use cases, can you walk us through each of the main ones?

Here is a simple video walkthrough of using ASGARDEX Desktop - YouTube
The UX is just like Uniswap, except that native assets can be traded with upfront fees. There will be multiple DEX interfaces that will enable Zcash support once they upgrade their Thorchain nodes & make a small lift per front end for which we have the support from Thorchain devs.

@holmesworcester

2. If there won’t be a user-friendly experience for this at the end of the grant because more work is required, could you give us an idea of what that additional work would look like? For example, you could write this up as an additional milestone in the proposal. We might not choose to fund this milestone right now, but we’ll have an idea of what the cost of necessary follow-on would would be.

ASGARDEX Desktop, ASGARDEX, THORSwap will be the front ends with user friendly front ends as seen in the video. Additionally, we might apply for a Nighthawk Wallet grant to make the front end integration possible within the wallets. Similarly, as mentioned in the grant, all Zcash developers can take advantage of this native swap feature once it goes live.

@holmesworcester

3. Because Nighthawk already has a few open grants, and because this would be another large grant, we’d like to make sure work is going well on all of your other grants before approving this one. Can you post updates here, or links to the latest updates if they’ve already been posted, so that we have it all in one place? Are all of the other projects on schedule right now? Is there anything else it would be helpful for us to review to be confident that work is on-schedule on the other grants?

Nighthawk grants are on schedule. Block Explorer’s July/August Delivery Timeline as per the grant & Nighthawk Wallet July Milestone are both on track. Work is going on towards the milestones. Thorchain work will begin only after the Block Explorer is delivered, that way there is no overlap or shortage of resources. We don’t want to hurry and release incomplete/insecure software that is prone to stability/security/privacy risks for the Zcash community. For following updates, please follow our GitHub commits nighthawk apps · GitHub or Twitter updates https://twitter.com/nighthawkwallet & https://twitter.com/lightwalletd or reach out to me anytime to setup a live features demo. Nighthawk Wallet Development Status will be regularly updated here https://nighthawkwallet.com/changelog/

For a quick gist of active Nighthawk grants:

1. https://lightwalletd.com for real time status, monthly warranty canaries, the next milestone is on January 2022 ZF Grants - 2 years of Lightwalletd Infra hosting & maintenance
2. GitHub - nighthawk-apps/zcash-explorer: Zcash Block Explorer Zcash Block Explorer work is on track too, with the last 2 pending items - Viewing Key support & 1 year hosting with tor onion access support, here is the latest update Zcash Block Explorer Grant - #29 by vamsi Next Milestone July/August 2021 ZF Grants - Zcash Block Explorer
3. https://nighthawkwallet.com is live with the first milestone wrapping up following the release of T-address support and manual shielding on Android, we had the iOS release go live this week. Our updates are spread out across the Zcash Weekly Newsletter & the Light Client Working Group GitHub - zcash/lcwg: Light Client Working Group project management repository with a Milestone 1 update due in July 2021 which will go live on the website. ZF Grants - Nighthawk Wallet Design & Development '21

Here is a grant Nighthawk has successfully delivered ZF Grants - Nighthawk Wallet maintenance + server costs

The Nighthawk team is here to help further the mission of Zcash and create tools that help sustain open networks, enabling anyone and everyone to protect their own privacy on their own terms.

@holmesworcester

4. We want to make sure that this grant will not leave you spread thin across too many projects. Can you talk us through how your team is set up, and give us some assurance that you will not be spread too thin?

None of the developers working on the Nighthawk Wallet will be working on the Thorchain grant. We are extending the team with 3 new developers for Thorchain and current developers will wrap up work on the Block Explorer before starting on the Thorchain tasks. The thorchain work will go on in parallel with the Mobile Wallet development which is disconnected with each other. There are 0 shared components or developer crossover.

@holmesworcester

5. Generally, we’re cautious about having too many open grants with a single grantee. Would you be open to waiting until the main Nighthawk wallet grant is completed before beginning this work? I believe the final milestone is scheduled for October, which isn’t too far off. There’s also an upcoming milestone for that grant in August.

I don’t believe it is necessary to block a feature development that has nothing to do with the wallet, none of the developers working on the wallet will be working on the Thorchain grant. Additionally, Nighthawk Wallet’s final milestone is in December, October is just the beginning of the 3rd milestone. So it would be unfair for the Zcash community to delay a feature that would benefit a new cohort of users of a privacy coin on a DEX. And Thorchain is actively looking to add additional native assets beyond the current 4 BTC, ETC, BCH & LTC and it would be great to have ZEC as the 5th one.

@holmesworcester

6. We’d like to see a more granular breakdown of costs, hours, and hourly rates for the different roles involved. Can you add this?

The compensation for this proposal is based on the value of the outcome for Zcash attaining increase in adoption on a DEX with high on-chain volume swaps being performed on a daily basis. The existing coins are doing between $100k for LTC & $3M for BTC as of July 2021, even if ZEC manages to clinch $25k, it equates to creating a $9M+ yearly DEX volume and incentives to earn ZEC by becoming a liquidity provider on Thorchain following the solution.

We are going with the standard quoted rates for experienced developers, which are getting very difficult to find as there is a talent crunch with all senior and lead developers as most tech companies are hiring remote, even in India. Ex. Coinbase is hiring 1000 Engineers in India and we are competing for talent against them amongst many other blockchain projects (like Blockfi) paying top dollar.
Also note, Nighthawk developers have promised to resolve all outstanding Thorchain Integration issues before the final delivery, this is a flat rate grant. Here is the cost breakdown:

Task                     Total   Resources
Development             120,000      4
Testing + Integration    60,000      3
Planning + Deployment    22,000      2
                      202,000 + 26,260(13% tax) = $228,260

@holmesworcester

7. It might be especially helpful to see if there any pieces of this work that are optional or could be broken out into another grant proposal. For example, am I right in understanding that a Zcash client in Go a necessary piece of this? Is that a full node or a light node? Would it make sense to break that out into a separate proposal, for clarity and reducing risk?

Golang based Bitfrost is completely native for Thorchain node that is supposed to observe the incoming Zcash transactions, make calculations and broadcast to thorchain network. It is not a full/light node in its essence, but it enables the Thorchain node operator to run a Zcashd full node natively within Thorchain’s blockchain. So, it doesn’t make sense to break this out into a separate proposal as this piece is an essential portion to deliver the end-to-end swap functionality. The only portion that can be broken out is the custom front end, which we haven’t included in this grant. Additionally, the work done as part of this grant would be reusable by future Zcash projects, especially the Kubernetes based setup for spinning up Zcash nodes at large scale.

To summarize:
We are prepared with access to both the human resources & a roadmap of items to be delivered for Thorchain integration that does not affect active Nighthawk grants. And we are reachable to formally provide current status of our work privately without making any incomplete, work-in-progress features public.