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:
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Tradeoffs between personalization and privacy(2)
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Outdated and outsourced technology that cannot provide a useful consolidated picture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:
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Private
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Cryptographically authenticated
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Easily digested
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Interactive and configurable
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Proportional to Zcash use
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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:
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Sustaining ongoing development efforts by paying engineers for the work they are doing
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Paying sub-contractors for:
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Testing
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Integration with related projects in the zcash community
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Outreach
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Design
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Hardware
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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