Zemo - Your Web3 Inbox

Community Grants
41

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.

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. :slightly_smiling_face: 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

6 Likes
42

Looks like Ziga’s marketing skills have caught Barry’s attention! Seems like he is interested in funding Zemo directly, I think this is great if it works out as Ziga mentioned about being open to VC money.

5 Likes
43

Personally, I found your message to be scattered, disrespectful and difficult to process.

I’ll attempt to summarize your feedback; please accept my apology if I misrepresented anything. It seems the committee is not interested in funding Zemo for the following reasons —

  1. Unsure of the messaging use case (referring to it as a “fun experiment” and “moonshot idea”)

  2. Your personal experience at Verizon makes you believe Zemo can’t be built in 6 months? It’s not clear what your point was there and how it directly relates to our proposal.

  3. Major concern that we haven’t reached out to “wallet devs”. That’s not true. I’ve reached out to @adityapk00 multiple times. In addition, Chris is also a Zcash wallet dev. He built Zcash into OpenBazaar/Haven as a payment option in 2018. In Bitcoin, he worked on SVP wallets, lightwallets and lead development on a fast-syncing full node (BCHD) for Bitcoin Cash. It’s difficult to find crypto devs with more experience than Chris.

As I mentioned before, we’re completely open to working with other wallet teams, ECC and others. The messaging protocol design has always been included in our 1st milestone requirements, which would include collaboration efforts with other teams. It’s difficult to do this work upfront without proper funding.

  1. The committee seem to express concerns because a v2 grant proposal of Zemo hasn’t been defined yet? I don’t understand. Has any other project been required to do this during their 1st proposal?

  2. The committee seem to suggest we should build in UAs into Zemo v1. For the record, we’re open to it and still exploring. With that said, I expect the app would take longer to complete / require a higher budget w/ UAs included. Please consider the extra costs required.

  3. The committee also suggest we should open a “small grant” just to design the UI/UX? Meaning, the committee want to see a lower budget proposal.

  4. The committee also seems to suggest we should consider taking funding from VCs? I don’t understand why the committee feels they should openly make statements like this while still reviewing our proposal. I’ve made it clear I want Zemo to be community funded.

  5. The committee asked me to expand on the proposal details. I agree, more can be done here.

  6. You seem to mock my “marketing skills”.

It’s very difficult to know how to proceed from here; the feedback is too disjointed. I could add more clarity to point 8, but considering the statements the committee has made above, it seems you’ve already dismissed our proposal on many other reasons.

In all honesty, I’m very disappointed with the quality of response from the committee here. Chris and I are competent contributors that are interested in building tools for the Zcash ecosystem. After reading your response, I feel discouraged, confused and unsure how to proceed.

4 Likes
44

Hey @Ziga it is unfortunate that you found my reply disrespecting or mocking. I am proud of your marketing efforts and genuinely believe there are very few Zcash projects that have captured the new use-case sentiment as Zemo has.

Let’s schedule a call with the ZCG to go over the unresolved issues with the Zemo proposal.

10 Likes
45

With modern tools, time to build high-quality application is not in years but months. However, a milestone payment can be based on the release of iOS & Android app.

2 Likes
46

Us discarding the idea of messaging on Zcash is equivalent to others discarding idea that people would use Zcash for payments.

3 Likes
47

My 2zats…

I’d still prefer ZCG fund this. To be clear that doesn’t mean I’d necessarily vote yes today but I’d definitely be leaning yes and encourage Ziga get the proposal to a state I could vote yes.

Also I don’t see this as a moonshot/impossible idea even in its present state. My main goal with projects like this would be introducing new users to Zcash. How much is a user worth? $10? $20?

So if the goal is to introduce 100,000 new users at $10 per user then my threshold for the probability of success needs to be above (($180,000 / 100,000) / $10) 18%. Does this proposal have an 18% chance of introducing 100,000 new users to Zcash?

3 Likes
48

My 2 ⓩ:

It seems to me that ZCG feels this is a risky project. Risky in the sense that they are not sure of the outcome, the impact on the community, or the ROI.

I think it should be feasible to set up the project in an agile framework, with clear milestones tied to payments, as many and as often as ZCG needs to feel confident that they can pull the plug if their definition of success is not accomplished. For example, if there are doubts about the technical feasibility, set up the first milestone for x% of the budget to be paid once the technical design is delivered and provide clear acceptance criteria for said design.

I am disappointed with the responses from ZCG so far because it is not clear what they would consider a successful outcome, a big impact on the community, or a good ROI. It feels like the focus is on cost and I don’t think the ecosystem is at a point where you would have multiple development teams bidding the cost of projects down.

Again, best of luck @Ziga!

8 Likes
49

^ Couldn’t have said better!

50

Sorry for the slow response — we took a few days away to process the feedback.

Currently, it feels like there are too many points of contention regarding the proposal: messaging idea lacks consensus, grant amount too high, technical approach concerns, longer-term funding?, etc.

I feel the timing isn’t quite right to rush into building Zemo. At this point, it seems best to wait for Halo to launch first, give everyone more time to process the Web3 messaging concept, develop a better strategy for how messaging will work with UAs, etc.

ZCG let’s continue the conversation once you feel more committed to building messaging apps on Zcash.

8 Likes
51

@Ziga Thank you for your thoughtful response. Give us a week to get our thoughts together, and we’ll reach out to set up a call with you for one day next week to discuss your proposal and the best path forward.

4 Likes
52

Hello Ziga,
let me say first that I am in favour of this grant. I think a messaging app could add great value to the Zcash ecosystem. And, the point is, there is already other project trying to leverage privacy messaging through blockchain.
Who remember digital cash? Its founder David Chaum launched xx messenger in January:

https://twitter.com/chaumdotcom

+10k download in Android

Looks like there is some interest, hope Zemo won’t arrive too late.

1 Like
53

What if Zemo followed the Oxen/Sessions model? Zcash for payments instead of monero fork and signal fork for messaging.

1 Like
54

Now that Halo has been launched can we fund this!?!?

4 Likes
55

Any updates on this great proposal? Last replies have been 7 months away…
This app is worth another round of discussion, sorry for bringing this up again :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe the Zcash Community can find another way of funding this?

2 Likes
56

After this proposal was zeme team which abandoned unfortunately

57

I believe Zeme Teme was before this proposal and was maintained more or less until Zemo didn’t work out.

1 Like
58

Yeah I can’t remember exactly which was first, ziga posted last time and that was pretty much it

59

This has been dead for some time, but I will prob integrate chat features into Zero. By the looks of it this project never got funded. I think the network might be in a better place now with fast sync features. However, until I dig into the code won’t know the limitations of implementing something like this. However, it is worth the try.

2 Likes
60

You can basically use free2z and ywallet/zingo to accomplish Zemo. Slicker wallets with nicer memo/reply/contact features will always be welcome. But, lets get the simple money+memo case beautifully implemented and then sprinkle on some nicer reply/contact and address book support to the wallets we have and new wallets?

Zemo is a cool idea that was part of the inspiration for free2z. But, i dont think it needs to be focused on beyond ever smoother wallet interfaces with memo support …

We will add fancy zip321 memo contact interface in free2z …

3 Likes