Greetings Zcasher!
The collaborators in this picture from last September, are now solving problems and writing code!
Today, it’s my pleasure to share a snapshot of the achievements coming from the bustling, self-identified Zingoista community.
I’ll offer a glimpse of the intersecting interactions I’ve had with these beautiful individuals.
I can only report on a sliver of that activity!
If you’re curious about other perspectives, you might be able get them from people like @dismad in the ZecHub matrix channel or @Edicksonjga in the ZingoLabs matrix channel.
(Thanks to the consistent attention of @vito both of those channels bridge into discord!)
So, here’re some of our (intersecting) efforts:
TL;DR:
Zingo Labs completed two ZCG grant milestones ZeWIF and Zaino, and produced a POC messaging app Chasqui for user testing this week. Next week, we’ll release a new stable Zingo Mobile app. We anticipate a significantly upgraded “Zingo 2.0”, by March 22nd.
Chasqui is an application that we think will offer people a novel (and healthier) way to communicate. Zaino and ZeWIF are our work contributing to:
Upgrading To The New Edition of Zcash!
Almost all Zingo Labs development efforts are directed to work that will allow the community to deprecate Zcashd. The unspoken part of that is “in favor of Zebrad and related tools”. We’re helping to complete and complement Zebra, so that it can provide the full measure of its long-promised value.
“Zcashd deprecation” doesn’t properly represent the effort.
So I am wondering about calling this major upgrade to the implementation of the Zcash protocol, a new edition, similar in principle to the notion of a Rust edition.
Zcash 2025?
The Zingo Labs role has been to take responsibility for the design, implementation, test, and deployment of the Zaino indexer to offer full support for lightclients, blockexplorers, and other non-finalizing peers in the Zcash ecosystem.
We’ve also partnered with the Block Chain Commons to standardize how Zcash applications can share wallet files, opening the application development space to more innovation, since it’s possible for users to transfer their data from application to application. We think everyone ought to have multiple Zcash apps, each specialized in their own way, in the vast space of potential uses of Zcash.
This is a new architecture!
But this isn’t a complete description of the protocol implementation upgrade work that’s taking place!
When we talk about replacing the original block-chain validation software that implements Zcash, what we are talking about is an upgrade to the latest and best technologies available.
This is a major effort, that has already resulted in a fundamentally better architecture implementing the core Zcash protocol.
The newer pure Rust projects like Zallet->Zaino->Zebra ( Z^3 ) that implement modern Zcash 2025 are exactly that, a substantial upgrade to a new “Edition” of the Zcash protocol. This is an upgrade not just in the details of specific previously implemented protocols, it’s an upgrade to a more decentralized, robust, and efficient architecture that, when complete, will radically accelerate our community-wide development velocity.
In other words this is a new software architecture AND…
A new architecture, at the organizational level
Simply put, there are more development teams, and more engineers, and not just a few more.
AND… adding up the number of engineers to measure our capability linearly, isn’t the best model of what is happening.
It’s also not just that there are three (and maybe soon four) teams working on the core consensus nodes, resulting in more specialization in discrete components.
To understand why it’s more than that, we need to understand what the core node “Zcashd” is.
The process of completing Zebra (and related components Zallet and Zaino) will result in a multiplicative addition of capability because we are, as of this moment, trapped behind Zcashd.
Zcashd is an outdated fork, of a POC implementation, of a (then novel) protocol (Bitcoin) in an obsolete language (C++).
To understand the upsides we are approaching, it’s important to understand who is well placed to develop new features and algorithms (and fix bugs) in the relevant codebases, starting with the legacy Zcashd node.
In Zcashd it’s approximately true that there’s one person who’s immediately ready to implement brand-new features, and land critical bug-fixes in the core code.
That’s a mild exaggeration, there are more engineers who could, with some significant costs in reallocating from other work, refreshing on the codebase, and switching primary languages, work in the legacy codebase. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that every single one of those people would almost certainly say that they prefer to work in Rust, instead of C++. It’s certainly the case that all of them would be more effective in Rust.
What this means is that for the critical resource of the developers of the core node functionality, finally eliminating Zcashd, will result in a multiplicative increase. Many more developers will be able to interact with and learn from Z^3, Zcash 2025, than is the case with Zcashd.
In fact it’s such a significant shift in community-wide capability, that it will almost certainly mean that innovation velocity will no longer block on this paralyzing single choke-point of failure, and will hit other bounding conditions.
Why the horse must come before the cart
And why are Zingoistas so excited about Z^3, Zcash 2025?
Which features are we yearning to release!?!
I am hearing various people lobby (vigorously) for their favorite feature. People earnestly believe they see how this-or-that feature will let Zcash finally begin to achieve its long overdue market valuation.
Zingoistas do have their own favorite horse.
But I don’t think we should bet on any of them.
I think we should discipline ourselves and focus as intelligently and efficiently as possible on Z^3, Zcash 2025. We should defer special interests, and protocol changes that aren’t necessary for Z^3, Zcash 2025, and we should get it done.
Because:
When Z^3, Zcash 2025 is complete (and I suppose you can guess which year I think it should be in), then by my previous argument, we should expect a multiplicative increase in Zcash development.
Without difficulty, I can think of ~ 15 developers who are fully capable of writing safe-and-sound Rust that could contribute to core components if those components were modern well-tested Rust.
That’s right I am claiming that there will be a 15-fold (at least) increase in our capability to hack the foundational components of our system.
Not just the person writing the feature… the people who’ve been held back from effective code review, from documentation… the people what haven’t been able to test in their most proficient language (Rust), and above all the people who will be able to learn from Z^3, Zcash 2025!
And I claim that will translate into a significant acceleration of all of these features:
- CrossLink / PoS
- Scaleable payments
- Coin-Weighted Voting
- Mixnet-Based (Nym) network privacy
- Liberated Payments
- ZSAs
- User-Owned (Consensual) Messaging
- Private Multi-Signature (FROST)
- Delegated (Vault) Value storage
- Efficient Fund Recovery
- …
Let me forestall an objection that some of these features don’t require work in Zcashd itself. I am not claiming that. I am claiming that all of these features will be easier to land in the Z^3, Zcash 2025 landscape.
Z^3, Zcash 2025 is a bet on all of these horses.
What we should do, is continue to develop each of them independently while also completing Z^3, Zcash 2025 as quickly as possible.
What we should not do, is bet against all the other horses in the race, without a compelling public argument for why we’re confident one of them is more valuable than all the others combined.
To be clear, I am advocating that we keep working on all of the above features, up to the limit allowed by focusing all the resources we efficiently can on Zcashd deprecation (Z^3, Zcash 2025).
The Zingoista Horse
Zingo Labs is eager to implement participant-owned communication. Perhaps something like our Chasqui POC application.
We want to combine ZK payments, liberated payment, and state of the art communication protocols, to onboard people into Zcash.
People from:
- outside Zcash
- outside privacy
- outside cryptocurrency
- outside “The West”
into Zcash.
We think that the combination of liberated payments during onboard, with secure-and-owned communication where participants have a stake in the fate of their communications is compelling. We hope to transfer some of that value directly into Zcash R&D, through message-linked fees.
That’s the horse we want to back, along with all the others.
Zcashd delenda est.
