Hi, thanks for the detailed grant explanation.
It’s not clear to me what constitutes improvements, technical debt fixes to ZecWallet vs contributions to the lightwallet ecosystem. For instance, it mentions switching away from electron, anchor_offset and scalability issues. These seems to be decisions that ZW makes and not necessarily applicable as a whole.
Then it also says “spend unconfirmed funds”. I’m not clear how this can be done since the note commitment is not yet part of the merkle tree. And then there are mempool changes to lightwalletd.
I understand there is a level of research and protocol improvements to be done but in my opinion, this should be part of another task towards standardization of the lightwallet libraries.
For example, when I was looking to implement a small feature I realized that my options were limited. Only open source wallet is ZW and therefore it is the obvious choice. But then there are also an ECC libraries and I learned ZW forked lightwalletd. To me, regardless of the technical/historical reasons, this gap makes it hard for a new developer to invest in ZW or even lightwallets in general.
As it stands, I’m concerned that this proposal will further separate ZW from zcash/lightwalletd. A new contributor would have to somehow pick a side.