Zingo! Onward

Zingo Labs Vermilion is announcing Zingo 1.4.2, with PTFM!

(And then poofing out of existence, as Zingo Labs are wont to do… but don’t worry Zingo Labs ${NEW_COLOR} is already emerging!)

That’s right PTFM… the “Proportional Transfer Fee Mechanism”.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it by its “ZIP nym”, ZIP317.

I mention it up front, because it ensures that Zingo! operates efficiently in the 0 unpaid actions environment that Zebrad is now enforcing on mainnet.

If that doesn’t mean a lot to you, then just know that your Zingo! transactions will be accepted by Zebrad because we are paying the standard fees. You may have noticed some transactions failing to complete in the last few weeks. If that’s the case, then please try again with the latest version of Zingo!

BUT… that’s far from the only feature, and it’s not really the thing I am most excited about.

When Zingo Labs decided to take over from the abruptly abandoned ZecWallet during the NU5 upgrade, we did so because we believed that was what the community needed (because all of a sudden our wallets stopped working!). But we’d been exploring the space already, and we already had a vision.

From the beginning we believed that Zcash was fundamentally about cooperation.

A new way for consenting people to come together and thrive, without the permission of any authority. To us the fundamental metaphor of the blockchain is not “transactions”, but “collaborations”. Every transaction implies a side-channel connection, a context for cooperation.

That’s what we’ve always intended to build, this coherence of intent is why we’ve been so consistent, why our Path is unwavering. A brief glance at our history shows us building first the necessary foundations:

  1. NU5 transaction parsing
  2. Orchard transactions
  3. sync enhancements (ShardTree and Background Sync, thanks @Honza !)

Then to collaboration tools atop them:

  1. Address Books
  2. Finsights
  3. Basic and Advanced modes, so both the Super Hacker, and their less technical friend can participate.

Now new features aligned with our goal of facilitating a radical diversity of collaborations:

  1. The ValueTransfer, the thing that’s smaller than a transaction, but larger than a note. The thing that Users care about… how much value was transferred to whom.
  2. Support for Portuguese and Russian
  3. Notifications when sends confirm.

Novel mechanisms for supporting us:

  1. Tipping, Zennies For Zingo that sends us 0.01 ZEC per transaction. This gives us a lot of insight into usage patterns of a certain class of users, and incentivizes us to make sending transactions easy.
  2. A simple donation, send us some ZEC!
  3. Vote for Nym, give us some idea of how the community feels about prioritizing Nym network privacy.

And what’s next:

  1. ZIP320 TEX support
  2. More Nym-ness
  3. Hardware wallet support with ZonDax
  4. FROST support with the ZF

This direction, to the Real Private DAO, via an intuitive FROST supporting interface for distributed control of a Zingo Lab fund pool, has been our long term goal since before ZecWallet vanished. We’re continuing on this trajectory which is the trajectory dictated to us by our Users… i.e. us.

And speaking of collaboration, it’s important to recognize just how much of it there is across the groups in our community. @Honza (who I mentioned before) isn’t a Zingoista! (Unless he says he is, in which case I apologize for my error). He is an ECC engineer and his work is why we have Android Background Sync. We couldn’t focus on our collaboration interface, without the collaboration of many groups. Thanks to @Honza and the ECC for all the hard work they’ve done to support us. When they first starting focusing on pushing Zashi into User hands, I was a bit grumpy, but now I am seeing just how much space there is that we need to explore. I am grateful we have fellow travelers helping to chart the future.

19 Likes