Zemo - Your Web3 Inbox

[aiyadt]

Hey @Ziga !

Thank you for your invigorating proposal and for bringing excitement to the Zcash community, on the forums & on Twitter. The Zemo app idea falls under the Zapps category - applications on top of the Zcash network for funding by Zcash Community Grants.

@Ziga

• Do you feel Zemo could help grow the Zcash community?

• Does Zemo offer an attractive way to onboard new users into using Zcash?

• Does Zemo expand the utility of the ZEC asset in meaningful ways?

• What are the downside risks if Zemo doesn’t achieve meaningful growth?

• If Zemo becomes a leading tool in the Zcash ecosystem, will the committee stand by us and continue to fund development?

• Are there ways ZF, Zcash community grants, etc. can contribute to driving usage of Zemo? e.g. Messaging parties on Twitter Spaces, Ambassador program promotion, etc.

Expanding on Shielded Messaging use cases has been of interest to the Zcash community for a while now and the hints of marketing and vision that Zemo wants to go after aligns with what the community would like to see built as a use case. As for if Zemo is the answer to expand the utility and for downside risk, read my reply below. @ZcashGrants is here to support teams contributing to the adoption and usability of Zcash, applications that meet the criteria and wants by the community to get funded for long-term success. As for ways ZCG can contribute to driving the usage of community-built apps: we’ve been conducting Twitter Spaces with Developer teams and working with Ambassadors to help drive Zcash adoption in every meaningful way. @Ziga you are part of the ambassador program as well. We’d be open to suggestions around what else is possible.

I appreciate your work on Zemo, which I believe started in July of last year.

Zemo🛡️💬

There have seen an uptick in z2z transactions since last year, but it has still been a slow climb up.

zcash-metrics

@Ziga

Messaging is already a growing use case in the Zcash community.

Sadly, I haven’t found messaging use cases extend beyond casual hellos after hosting a couple of shielded love notes on Twitter Spaces. When sending z2z memos to friends and family, the primary reason provided by the receivers when asked about using z2z as a messaging inbox comes down to the fact that messages on the blockchain are permanent & irrevocable. Although, I am positive towards the idea of a monetizable messaging inbox on the blockchain.

Personally, I have worked on Verizon Messages+ application with unified conversation history( including audio, video & photo sharing). My team worked with a group of dedicated designers from Frog Design NYC. The design phase itself took more than 6 months to iron out all the text delivery statuses, scenarios around managing conversational threads, error scenarios, and load times - and that too when all the messages were readily available from the phone’s local database! We did end up shipping the unified conversation UX after 2 years of development which was initially planned for 12 months. The delay was due to the underlying messaging database(across several phone manufacturer ROMs) libraries not being optimized for speedy access, which resulted in janky operations in the UI when a stream of information needed to be put together. (All we did was improved the text-only messaging to include multi-media aspects). Today, the end user has much higher expectation of app quality and fast load times.

@Ziga

There have been some very casual Twitter conversations floating out there, but nothing concrete yet. We have this work scheduled for our 1st milestone.

@Ziga

We haven’t joined the conversations yet. If Zemo becomes an app the committee and community decided to support, then we’ll be excited to participate in the conversations.

The Zcash developer group is still a small community today, it would be a good idea to work together to improve the underlying tech before getting large sums to moonshot ideas. IMO the fact that you haven’t reached out to wallet devs during a period when Zcash is undergoing a massive network upgrade is a major concern; before promising an end-user app that is written ground up(per your comment). Getting light clients to work seamlessly, handling reorgs, and providing an error-free experience is a very involving process that often requires getting help from ECC & ZF devs via Discord/GitHub. Have you connected with any Zcash developers?

You also mention relying on lightwalletd, did you know the lightwalletd codebase that ZecWallet relies on, is a custom fork that @adityapk00 has been maintaining which is not 1:1 with ECC’s lightwalletd codebase. Additionally, we do not know how long will Adityapk continue running ZecWallet’s custom lightwalletd servers/infrastructure, which itself required separate funding. Are you planning to run infrastructure with the custom lightwalletd setup? Have you reached out to ECC/ZF regarding the status of ZecWallet & ZecWallet’s custom lightwalletd setup?

Zemo🛡️💬

As much as I’d personally like to fund fun experiments around z2z or expansion of fun experiments with Zcash use cases. The amount of funding requested in this grant falls under a large grant category. Single sentence descriptions with technical/marketing buzzwords does not do this proposal justice and makes it difficult to evaluate this grant, even though we all share the vision for new Zcash use-cases. We all can get excited with a new application coming to Zcash, but we know that the proof is in the pudding. The lack of technical details in this large grant is another concern to me, and it seems like a huge ask to develop a proof of concept application for 6 months with elements left out for a v2, which will most likely require an extended grant to finish. I am not satisfied with the idea of not supporting Unified Addresses which will be a de facto expectation in 6 months from now - trustless UA transactions vs Z-address transactions. Additionally, every time someone sends a UA to Z transaction, the transaction amounts will be made public on the blockchain, I’m not sure if it will be the best for the Zcash community to fund new grants that do not include support for UAs.

I suggest Zemo start with a small grant to iron out the design/UX flows and possibly build a basic z2z messaging UI within ZecWallet before aiming to start a large grant work on a separate app. This way, once UAs are operational, your team might feel comfortable integrating UAs and you can show concrete app designs before embarking on the long journey. I’d also like to know more about the history of apps designed by you to gauge the level of quality for end-user apps that have shipped in the App Store/Play Store.

@Ziga

Due to the character limitations on the grant proposal website, we didn’t mention many of the additional features that we were planning to include in the proposal

Please feel free to expand on the grant via an attachment/PDF including detailed milestones and even expanding on the details in the forum post. Doing so would help ZCG review the breadth of the proposal.