I think codifying the a) 21m cap and b) the existing halving schedule (no increasing in issuance above the existing schedule as long as we are on POW) would help remove any doubts about the ability of ZEC to be a wealth storage technology. This would be ZEC positive. It would also free up people to think about how to create value instead of ways to dilute ZEC holders. As I have proposed many times, the only viable long term solution is gas/fees which charged to ZEC transfers and/or future assets. In my opinion, coins that depend on inflation, such as Monero, will ultimately have a major problem because they wont be able to keep up with the competition/development requirements, without destroying the value of their coins. This type of strong support for ZEC as wealth storage would be an easy and very strong way to show ZeBoot is about creating value as represented and embodied by ZEC.
Zeboot wrapup
Zeboot is a wrap. This week, Electric Coin Co. (ECC) gathered in Palm Springs with a dozen ecosystem and community members from disparate corners of the world to set a roadmap for the coming months. The event spanned four days, with two of those days set aside for ECC team members only.
The insights from the event were extremely valuable, and there was universal agreement that we need to do this kind of meeting again — soon and often. A few themes guided our sessions and workshops.
- The world needs Zcash, immediately.
- Our number one priority at ECC is Zcash adoption.
- We need to ship code, faster and more frequently.
- ECC owes it to the community to align our efforts and build products and user experiences that make Zcash useful and accessible.
- With increasing regulatory pressure in the U.S. and across the world, it’s more urgent than ever to release open-source software that can be picked up by others, if necessary, to carry forth and deliver on a mission of empowering people to be free, regardless of what happens to ECC.
- To do this, ECC needs to identify places of friction, such as legacy code and internal inefficiencies that slow us down, and remove them.
Event summary and next steps
There is a ton of feedback and information to synthesize from Zeboot, and we’ll have more clarity in the coming days, but a few very specific priorities emerged. At the top of the list are launching Zashi 1.0 in the app stores in March and, in partnership with the Zcash Foundation (ZF), retiring zcashd and replacing it with zebrad and other tooling.
Timelines and final objectives on other potential work, such as NU6, an evolving Zashi roadmap (including messaging functionality, “ZEC to credit card,” and other features), proof of stake, liberated payments, DEX integration, and others will be evaluated and charted this month.
ECC-led presentations and workshops:
- A vision for Zcash (presentation)— Josh Swihart, CEO
- Ranking possibilities (workshop) — Chris Tomeo, Head of Comms and Media
- Current state of Zashi (presentation and workshop) — Chris Tomeo
- Who is our target user? (workshop) — Josh
- Exploring opportunities where ECC can have the greatest impact on Zcash adoption (workshop) — Josh
- Functional prioritization (workshop) — Josh
- Current state of PoS research and findings (presentation) — Nate Wilcox, former Head of Research, and Daira Hopwood, R&D Engineering Manager
- Technical debt and Zcash ecosystem obligations (workshop) — Josh
- Governance, assessing community sentiment, and dev funding (presentation) — Paul Brigner, VP of Strategic Alliances
- Exploring opportunities where ECC can have the greatest impact on Zcash adoption (workshop) — Josh
- Functional prioritization (workshop) — Josh
Community member presentations:
- Tatyana of ZURE, a ZCG-funded project, presented her research on Zcash users. One substantive piece of data that impacted Zeboot discussions was that the NPS of Zcash users who transact is significantly higher than that of users who primarily hold Zcash. She plans to post a summary of her talk soon, so keep an eye on @usezcash on Twitter/X.
- Ian Sagstetter presented “Zcash to sovereign rollup: An alternative PoS proposal.” He posted about this on the forum in January. As a next step, Ian is planning to set up R&D calls with influential contributors inside and outside the Zcash community.
Some Zeboot highlights
A vision for Zcash
ECC CEO Josh Swihart, 30-something days into his new role, kicked off Zeboot with his vision for Zcash. It’s ambitious — a comprehensive user experience that expands Zcash utility across use cases and ecosystems and empowers users to store, spend, and protect their assets. He’s posted about this before.
The vision is multi-layered, but he summed up his hypothesis going into the meetings like this: “Until we have user-friendly access and private storage, nothing else matters.”
(Spoiler alert: We changed his mind on a few things.)
Ranking possibilities
With limited budget and people resources, ECC needs to make decisions about where we focus over the next 12 months. So after hearing Josh’s vision on Tuesday morning, Zebooters were given a chance to make their voices heard.
Participants were given a stack of bills (fake ones), and asked to allocate them to products, features, and capabilities that they believed would move the needle on Zcash adoption.
Each person received a $100, $50, $20, $10, $5, $2, and $1 bill, and they dropped the money into ballot boxes that were labeled with different user-focused outcomes. Participants were allowed to put multiple bills into any single box, but the rules dictated that each participant had to put money in at least three boxes.
When the results were tallied, “Venmo for ZEC” was a clear winner, followed by “Trade ZEC and other tokens on a DEX that does not require KYC.” This sheet contains the full results.
We repeated the exercise at the end of Day 2, and added a box for “A standalone private messaging app as part of a suite of products,” which was an idea that emerged in other sessions. The two winning priorities from Day 1 flipped positions but remained at the top, while the messaging app came in third. Those results are here.
The exercise was imperfect, no doubt, but it was informative — and fun!
Promotions announced
Paul Brigner was promoted to Vice President of Strategic Alliances. In addition to focusing on his policy and advocacy in DC, his new role will include a substantial focus on ecosystem partnerships that drive impact and adoption, plus work with Zcash coinholders and stakeholders on governance-related issues. That work will include facilitating open and transparent engagement to identify and adopt resilient mechanisms for community deliberations and decision making.
Daira Emma Hopwood — who has been part of the ECC team since the beginning and was instrumental in launching Zcash in 2016 — was promoted to R&D engineering manager. In this new role, Daira will lead our R&D efforts and manage our engineering priorities and core team.
Immediate ECC priorities
Release Zashi 1.0
The Zashi private beta program has been going well since August (Zcon4), and we onboarded all the Zeboot participants on Tuesday. Overall feedback was good, we identified a few simple UX improvements, and we’re looking forward to getting this into the iOS and Android app stores in March. Here’s the current state:
Understanding user needs and building for them is critical, and we’re kicking off a deliberate effort to learn more. And as we learn more, we’ll adjust with frequent iterative releases.
Our Zashi development team, Lukas Korba (iOS) and Honza Rychnovský (Android), was on hand at Zeboot, as was our new project manager, Andrea Kobrlova. She is a critical piece and a much-welcome addition to this team!
In addition to helping guide Zashi development efforts, she’ll work with the community to help ECC validate assumptions and ensure our releases are aligned with Zcash user needs and real world use cases. She’ll also be part of a collaborative effort to consolidate and manage a roadmap that aligns our R&D team efforts with our Zashi team efforts.
Zcashd to Zebrad
The other immediate priority for ECC is the retirement of zcashd and a move to zebrad, the independent node built by the Zcash Foundation using memory-safe Rust language. There are specific challenges in this transition, including the absence of a wallet in Zebra, but this move will eliminate painful tech debt and provide significant added efficiency for future development efforts.
Old code and tech debt is a killer. We estimate that with NU5 and the sandblasting incident, for example, 80 percent of our time was spent dealing existing code and only 20 percent on innovation. We need to flip that.
ECC and ZF are excited to collaborate on this important effort, and we’ll release more information when the timeline is mapped.
Proof of stake
Moving Zcash to proof of stake could have significant impacts on adoption — e.g., improving finality, unlocking interoperability, and giving Zcash users a new way to make use of their coins.
The road to proof of stake, however, is complex and it could take more than a year to build it out. Under Daira Emma Hopwood’s leadership, the R&D team is prioritizing a closer look at the timeline to determine what is realistic and how a transition to proof of stake aligns with other adoption-focused opportunities.
…
Sunrise over Palm Springs at Zeboot, Feb. 1, 2024. Photo by Lukas Korba, Zashi iOS developer
I used to be a member of the Zcash community but I left it around 2022 for several reasons that I will refrain from getting into. It’s really encouraging to see these conversations being had to steer Zcash in the right direction.
However, I think one area that’s being vastly overlooked is the Zcash brand itself. I say this with the understanding that there’s a new website and a new style of branding, but I just don’t believe that this branding is the kind that would resonate with the privacy audience that we have in Web3 today.
It’s not edgy. It’s not urgent in its tone. It’s not compelling and it’s just way too mellow.
Sometimes I look at a lot of the content that is being pushed out through the Zcash channels, and I feel like the folks behind Zcash are really out of touch with what people in the privacy space in Web3 expect from a privacy centric technology.
I highly recommend exploring this area as well, to address this issue, because as of right now the Zcash brand is just way too mellow and privacy is not a mellow subject.
Good start. I like it.
I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Never been using Venmo in my life.
Still hope for some serious hardware support. I wan to see the 80% of zcash shielded, this will boost Sapling and Orchand anonset size to the moon.
To clarify: Venmo itself has serious privacy issues. We wouldn’t be compromising on privacy for the potential feature being referred to here.
yea. i bet the Venmo is the ease of use kind of reference. or Paypal or Cashapp. simple money app.
A post was merged into an existing topic: 
Cypherpunk Zero NFT Megathread
Congrats on the promo. Hopefully it came with a raise.
A few questions if you don’t mind:
- What % of your time will be spent as an IC?
- Do you have open recs for hiring new engineers?
- How big is the current team
- How big are you looking to grow the eng team?
This is a really positive Initiative and I’m excited to see the roadmap that comes out of it.
Ranking possibilities: It would be interesting to see what the community polling would be for these options and how that would compare to the priorities ranked by attendees. Some I agree with and some i thought would be higher.
For example: ‘Have access to Zec on other chains’. From my observations most onboarding into crypto currently is for speculation(it is what is), so what would make Zcash most accessible and attractive to potential new users?
Zcash as private value storage that is easily integrated with the broader crypto ecosystem, that can be easily bridged to and from the Zcash blockchain would be a good start IMO.
Many new projects airdrop a % of their supply to existing projects to bootstrap a community for their project. Often these new projects prioritise airdrops to projects with ‘strong handed’ holders with the belief that they’re less likely to sell immediately. Zcash certainly fits the bill!
With so many new ZK and privacy projects I would like to believe that many of these projects would be keen to airdrop to ZEC holders if there was an easy mechanism for doing this. Perhaps as a form of retroactive public goods funding for holders.
Zcash being isolated without an existing airdrop mechanism means that this isn’t currently happening.
Users having the option to stake their ZEC, bridge funds to and from other ecosystems and being as eligible as holders of other projects to be included in the bootstrapping of new projects would go a long way to onboarding new Zcash users IMO.
Some of what I have said might be frowned upon but from my observations it’s the current truth.
Of course long term Zcash has loftier ambitions than this but the value of onboarding new users shouldn’t be discounted.
Thank you to all who attended and feeling positive for what the future holds!
Something I really want to see over the next 6 months is ECC try to source external funding to boost the treasury to enable some of these ideas to get built quickly
I’m most excited about the POS conversion! I hope it will be converted to POS as soon as possible.
The thing that is not adding up is why there wasn’t an emphasis on the discussion around ZSAs.
Per @joshs’s original post:
I didn’t see it mentioned in the synopsis, but I’m pretty sure that is supposed to be what allows airdrops on ZEC…
I think there needs to be way more cohesion for this project. Way too many disjointed grants with an ambiguous direction of how they fit into the vision.
Yeah hopefully ZSA’s were discussed and just not detailed above. You’re probably right that ZSA’s will enable airdrops and maybe building the bridges are largely covered as part of ZSA’s(although maybe to certain ecosystems or maybe only part of the work).
Agree that there needs to be cohesion between ECC, ZF, ZCG and any grants so that they’re all working towards the overall vision/strategy of the project.
I feel confident that this will improve and I can see things functioning in a more strategic way.
Setting the strategy, then determining how to achieve it
I think it’s more about determining ECCs long term vs short term goals.
Seems that ZSA are a longer term horizon item, but you definitely need to transition to Zebra first before you can build ZSAs.
And some work on hybrid PoS transition has already been done, so that may be another good short term achievement goal.
I’m all for checking “easier” items off the list for improvements vs doing more research without tangible results for end users.
Sure, I understand the “low-hanging fruit” aspect – and I’m all for it (especially deprecating zcashd), but when 30% of the hypothetical applications are tangentially or directly related to ZSAs, one would think it would require a bit more of a discussion as part of the general planning strategy.
We discussed ZSAs.
Our user focus was on core Zcash users and empowering them to onboard others adjacent to them. We still need the fundamentals.
Most/all of us would like to see them but there were questions about whether or not they would drive as much near term adoption as compared with other things. We also discussed other projects with like capability - Railgun, Namada, etc to look for uptake.
@peacemonger’s research was informative here as well, as there appears to be able to mobilize a community of users that want to effectively use funds more than simply store them. These things do go hand-and-hand.
On timing, Circle won’t issue zUSDC without controls on restrictions to addresses and the ability to freeze funds. Something like DAI is interesting if we have interop.
While their code is open source, Qedit is focused on a solution with KYC. Additionally, I think the focus on implementation within zebrad instead of zcashd is the right one, which means we need a path to zcashd retirement.
All in all, an important and significant part of the vision. I’d like to see a non-kyc ZSA pool with support on hardware and in Zashi, with the ability to collateralize them for payments. Certainly make your voice heard as well. Ears and eyes are open.
Tough to to synthesize days of rich conversation in a summary post.
Funding is a personal priority.
Ok this is the kind of discourse I was after! That’s good to hear. I’m not 100% sure they will one way or another, either. But it was a big grant, so that part is what makes me a bit nervous.
Ideally, grants would be more of a bounty system, vs. an open submission process. Maybe the ideas are sent in to a suggestion box, wherein a ZCAP (or coin-weighted) poll is created, and set to a vote. From there, maybe the top ideas are set with a bounty for funding from the community.
Would be nice.
Were you thinking of home-grown hardware for this (e.g. something like Ledger/Trezor)? I seem to recall that was your initial vision that you shared a few weeks back. Off the cuff, that seems like it would take a lot of resources and would spread your team very thin or require hiring more people (hardware engineers + software for the Ledger Live-esque system).
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
We may have to build it. Trezor failed. Ledger maybe, but other issues. To do that, you’re right, we need funding and likely a partner. But I’m convinced that no existing third party hardware vendor gets it like we do.