ZSA - Update on Release

I’m a big Zcash supporter since inception, and a bit worried to hear no recent update on ZSA as I believe this is a key driver for ZEC adoption if done right.
From my last readings, the ZSA support was outsourced to a very competent external third party thanks to Grants. I can see the development timeline on ZF grants, but no information on completed tasks, like what fee structure has been decided for the deadline of June 2022 that seems to be completed and paid. Is it still in active development or has this putted on hold? Is there an expected roadmap for release?

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Yes, the ZSA project is still active, and Qedit provides regular status updates. Please see the link below:

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What’s going on with ZSA? Is the development cancelled/stopped?

ZSAs are in the plan for NU7:

Development is ongoing:

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ZSA will completely change the game for many people in need of privacy when using tokens.

I too very eagerly await the release!

Another important ongoing endeavor is deprecating zcashd, a requirement to launch the ZSA feature. Contributors are making incredible progress on both fronts, we’ll get there.

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In Zip Editors' NU7 ZIP Viability Assessment the ZIP Editors recommended that QEDit consider whether it would be a good idea to require issuance fees to be consumed by a ZIP 233 burn operation instead of going to ordinary fees. I’d like to expand on my (personal) rationale for this suggestion:

ZIP 230: Version 6 Transaction Format specifies that the fee for issuance will be 100x the standard marginal fee. This larger-than-normal fee is an attractive target for miners, and could incentivize the “selfish mining” strategy; deployment of selfish mining would be detrimental to the network as a whole, and as such it’s my opinion that these fees should be burned, rather than sent to miners. The presence of ZSAs in the protocol incurs ongoing maintenance and data storage costs for the network, and so in my opinion burning these fees better compensates the network as a whole than would sending the fee value to the miner who wins the race to include an issuance transaction.

Would QEDit be open to modifying the fee computation in this fashion?

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Thanks for linking to the discussion (still ongoing) about it.

The original rationale for a big fee on issuance was a combination of spam avoidance and adding to ZEC economic value, looking at how other blockchains approached this (paying gas for minting on a smart contract). That’s the extent of the sophistication for the proposed fees, currently. :slight_smile:

Note that the tools available when we thought about the fees didn’t include burning ZEC (or “reallocating ZEC” to a fund).

From a project perspective, now that big milestones are finally happening one after the other for ZSA on NU7, with the ZIPs merged, audits about to publish, and a testnet right around the corner, our main angle of approach here is bringing this to devs, help Zcash integrate our branches, and ship-it!

Maybe we can imagine together what your suggested feature would look like, in the form of a rough pull-request to de-risk the shipping conversation? Happy to discuss it together and publish any conclusions we reach.

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