Zingo! Onward

Zingo Grant Proposal 2023

Authentic Financial Insight

Introduction

ZingoLabs is building technology, not just for Zcash specialists, cryptocurrency experts or power users, but for everyone. Users are rapidly adopting technologies that help them visualize their financial behaviour(1). However, these modern ‘fintech’ providers all suffer the following issues:

  • Tradeoffs between personalization and privacy(2)

  • Outdated and outsourced technology that cannot provide a useful consolidated picture

ZingoLab’s vision for a truly authentic form of financial insight - or ‘finsight’ - not only provides a solution to these issues but lays the foundations for a safer and more insightful approach to financial awareness. These insight enabling innovations stem from an assurance of exclusivity that is a unique feature of Zcash-based applications, the guarantee that the user is the only recipient of that finsight. Any system that fails to provide this form of finsight, cannot be deemed authentic.

Know your values, know your Self.

Who We Are

ZingoLabs is a growing distributed organization that is innovating on zcash and empowering its users. We built Orchard address sending-and-receiving in the full UA protocol, NU5 formats, and memos-as-infrastructure. Now, in collaboration with the wider Zcash Community, we’re innovating on that expertise to produce an ergonomic blockchain interface that empowers people to have a healthy relationship with their money and technology.

Meta Insight

Zingo is further leveraging the Encrypted Memo Field to provide users with richer insight into their transactions. This insight will be:

  • Private

  • Cryptographically authenticated

  • Easily digested

  • Interactive and configurable

  • Proportional to Zcash use

  • Tradeable

Organization

We’ve organized our goals into a set of auditable milestones (per standard ZCG proposals). We think of these as either a feature that will enhance the user’s experience, or a necessary pre-requisite of such a feature. Not all of our effort will be represented explicitly as a milestone deliverable.

A significant, and variable focus of our team’s efforts will necessarily be targeted at ongoing work that is inaccessible to end-users. Continuous integration tests of various kinds, various distribution pipelines, bug-fixes, response to support requests, and more forms of necessary work that are not easily captured in the milestone structure.

Startup Funds

We’re asking for 10_000 ZEC as an initial payout to support ongoing ZingoLab operations. This payout will be divided among several priorities:

  • Sustaining ongoing development efforts by paying engineers for the work they are doing

  • Paying sub-contractors for:

    • Testing

    • Integration with related projects in the zcash community

    • Outreach

    • Design

  • Hardware

  • Zingo Conf Hackathon Zero (a physical meetup of core team members)

Our intention is to thoughtfully promote Zcash adoption, use, and innovation with this funding with a particular focus on people most in need of Zcash’s unique features.

Concrete Milestones

Each milestone is expected to take roughly 1-2 months to complete, and will be compensated with 1875 ZEC. Some milestones have prerequisites where others can be worked on concurrently. In particular: A → B “A is a prerequisite of B”

Memo Crate (Address Book, Memo Sync)

(Basic Insight, Memo Sync) → Advanced Insight

We’ve already started work on Basic Insight and Memo Crate.

Basic Insight:

Overview: An “Insight” tab, providing graphical insight into its transaction history

Deliverable: Graphical summary of entire seed transaction history

Sync From Present:

Overview: Sync starts at tip of the blockchain, syncs backwards (detecting recent transactions first, etc), and handles reorgs in a way that isn’t crippled by The Sandblast

Deliverable: Sync with comparable efficiency to current sync

Memo Crate:

Overview: Publish crate full of easy-to-use utilities for memo fields

Deliverable: Cargo install zingo-memo

Authentic Address Management:

Overview: Store and retrieve a nym associated with transactions

Deliverable: Authenticated user-defined nyms in an ergonomic interface

Memo Sync:

Overview: Sync from the present, leveraging memos-to-self for efficiency

Deliverable: Zingo rapidly learns about seed-relevant transactions on rescans

Note Cultivation:

Overview: Prime Zingo with a set of spendable notes, as a function of funds

Deliverable: Three notes spend back to back

Viewing Key Import/Export Support:

Overview: Import and export reduced capability keys from Zingo

Deliverable: Viewing key copied from Zingo, Zingo launched with viewing key

Advanced Insight:

Overview: Leverage custom data in memo fields to provide rich finsight

Deliverable: Interactive summaries, including CounterParty Nyms

Total Ask

25_000 ZEC

Applicants

ZingoLabs

References

  1. Consumer Research: Latest Trends in Digital and Mobile Banking

  2. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210526005143/en/Capco-Study-72-of-Customers-Rate-Personalization-as-%E2%80%9CHighly-Important%E2%80%9D-in-Today%E2%80%99s- Financial-Services-Landscape

9 Likes

I think Zingo has the potential to be the first crypto wallet that will be more user-friendly than any finance apps out there. I like the fact that you guys focus on giving the users the insight to their private financial situation without relying on third party intermediaries who have the incentives to make you overspend and depend on their credit line.

I think financial independence/sovereignity shouldn’t be just about: “do you have enough amount of money to support yourself?”. But also more importantly: “do you make the financial decisions based on your own needs and wants OR do you make it based on what the advertisers and the banks want you to spend your money on?”.

5 Likes

As I understand it that’s about $1.1m USD for just under a year of development?

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I am sorry if I don’t understand what you say. Could you be more explicit and explain to me what authentic financial insights mean as if I am 5?

As it stands, the stuff you detailed look pretty classic wallet stuff to me. That’s why I don’t get why you ask that much for a wallet that currently has little track record (50+ downloads on Google Play).

Maybe you could provide a functional spec or something like that?

Congrats on your release of zingo!

2 Likes

It took me 3 days to digest this post and finally give it a heart. But, there are several things i like about zingolabs

  • zingo delivered a working solution under adverse circumstances
  • zingo has a dash or more of legitimate punk energy that is welcomed
  • zingo has built a nice underground confederacy of interesting people with honest motivations pushing towards a circular, consensual economy

Helping to get Zcash (orchard protocol ZEC) more used and accepted, without resorting to fiat, should be a primary goal here. And, I appreciate that Zingo! has ideas and use cases that dont necessitate quickly liquidating the ZEC but circulating it in the shielded pool.

At first glance i thought, “whoa! Wth! Thats a lot of ZEC, bro”. But, upon reflection, i think i support it.

We shoud rake @zancas over the coals on more specific deliverables and make him commit to reducing the number of permanent branches in git for zingolabs. The ideal number of branches is 0 or 1. 2 branches is too many.

7 Likes

Funnily enough, I took his grant post into ChatGPT and still was confused. The energy is good but the wordiness is atrocious. Please dumb it down a bit, @zancas.

On another note, is there a reason why your repo mentions that the apps are experimental on your repo: GitHub - zingolabs/zingo-mobile: Zingo! Android and iOS apps ?

2 Likes

Well, I would, but it seems like @tokidoki gets it at least as well as I do:

Maybe they can explain it to you!

Thanks for reminding me about the ‘experimental software’ disclaimers. We added those disclaimers during the scramble to incorporate the NU5 changes, and they’re long past due for removal.

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. It’s tricky trying to understand the audience! What did you think of @tokidoki 's reframing:

Did it makes sense to you?

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After discussion with the ZCG Committee we have revised our proposal such that this grant will exclusively cover the aspects of finsight that are part of wallet development.

We intend to separately apply for funding to develop components that, while necessary for our vision, more properly should be considered R&D.

This means that we have revised our ask for this proposal to be approximately 1/3d the original amount.

We’re excited to innovate in collaboration with the wider community to bring ethical technologies into existence!

The revised proposal is posted here:

6 Likes

I’m sorry but if you cannot explain yourself, it is a “no” for me.

2 Likes

This still seems like a cash grab to me.

The bar has been set quite high with YWallet already. I don’t see the value add from this grant; because you seem to be trying to re-solve things that should already be figured out or learned from better solutions (like warp sync).

Imho these funds would be far better spent on GPU acceleration and FROST implementation.

It’s great that Zingo has some folks who are excited about grants and working on Zcash related wallets, but folks…. Syncing and trial decryption UX is a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR issue for anyone who actually uses Zcash.

Similarly, any entity that has multiple users is currently SOL for shielded multi signing.

So let’s dig down to the REAL pain points and find and solve those.

That said, I don’t support this grant.

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Speaking as an ex-ZCG committee and a Zcash community member, Zancas has stepped up at a time in need to fork ZecWallet and continued its development by attracting the much-needed contributors to librustzcash, to strengthen and decentralize Zcash development. Zingo’s ask of $375,000 and Nighthawk’s $354,400 for the wallet development milestones should be encouraged by the community to not rely on a single developer at a single timezone. With all respect to Han and Ycash wallet to deliver trial decryption improvements, that alone does not qualify as UX for Zcash. User Experience is the ease of use and the capability of solving new users’ needs for self-custody and other use cases. Additionally, there is a major element of education that a wallet needs to deliver for the apps to be usable by first-time users. This is why I support funding Zingo.

FROST implementation too requires user-group study and designing features for real-world use cases, not simply shipping cli software and expecting DAOs and relevant parties to use the complex technology. The Zcash Foundation has supported FROST development and the specification has finally moved forward in the last few months, I am eager to learn about the latest status.

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Did you know that Zingo is the first production wallet with Orchard and UA with multi-receiver support? There is also an ongoing work to add Trezor hardware wallet support in Zingo.

I support this grant.

Notes: Edited my mistake.

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@tokidoki I don’t think this is true. ZWL with UA was released before Zingo. Zingo forked ZWL prior to the work on Orchard and I’m pretty sure Aditya implemented Orchard himself. You could argue Zingo has UA with multi receivers but a single receiver UA is still a UA.

Though having additional peer review is a good thing, there are commercial and open-source usages of FROST out there. The ZF is working on an implementation but it is not the only one. I think it is important to distinguish between the math & crypto research aspect and the real-world usage.

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Yes, sorry I remembered it wrongly. This was about transaction v5 work done by Zingo team.

I looked at the code change and I don’t see any Orchard related code there. Can you point out where it is in the commit?

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This code wasn’t directly related to orchard, it was upgrading to the v5 transaction format, that arrived in NU5 at the same time as the orchard pool.

Edit: I see that tokidoki edited their comment to reflect that.

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@zancas, Zingo Team, & Zcash Community, I am happy to announce that the @ZcashGrants Committee unanimously voted to approve this Grant Proposal at the revised amount of $375k at the most recent meeting.

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This is great news! New features will be available in Zingo shortly.

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