Zcash Shielded News | Vol.15

Onward | Z ECC Summit, ZSAs in NU7 Approved, FROST 2.1.0 Release & ECC | REFACTORING THE CODE

ZecHub

Jan 29, 2025

Zcash Shielded News is a community article format based on the weekly Zcash Ecosystem Digest Newsletter.

Providing insight on current events and informing the community about important news in the Zcash ecosystem.

Check out the best Highlights below

Finally we got the updates from Z | ECC Summit that we were looking forward to see!

The theme of this season was Onward as always, a nod to the ECC’s Cypherpunk roots and their continued commitment to build a private and free world.

The week opened with ECC-only sessions to reflect on the prior year, discuss the current state of their finances, and set the stage for the rest of the week.

In these sessions, ECC reviewed their ‘‘Hedgehog Concept’’ focusing on achieving greatness by identifying the intersection of three key elements: What you can be the best in the world at, what you are deeply passionate about and what best drives your economic or resource engine

Josh said this is part of a framework for how ECC think about their readiness and capability to deliver innovation and accelerate its adoption. On his point, ECC began 2024 at the far left of this image and ended the year by delivering innovation through discipline and now is the time to accelerate while continuing to build the flywheel that will propel Zcash to new heights.

🗣️Sessions | Z ECC Summit

Josh kicked off the event revisiting our roots and purpose with the Zcash community and ECC team with a great quote from Eric Hughes about the need for privacy for an open society in the electric age (highly recommended). Then he moved to where it started and delve into how Bitcoin has ushered us into an era of increased financial surveillance and the only way to reclaim this is embrace the ethos of those before us by building out a complete set of capabilities to empower a good private financial system.

The next steps were the potential new product of ECC like Zashi Vault & approach for Zashi Q1.

Then, Andrea led them through a review of ECC’s work on Zashi in 2024: The release for iOS at the end of March 2024 and the shipped 19 iOS & 16 Android releases in total last year.

🍎| iOS

🤖| Android

👀| MAYA OVERVIEW

The Maya Team provided and overview and conversation about the integration, presented information on how it works, and discussing how it could be implemented into Zashi. Through fees, it may also provide a source of funding for ECC.

Maya is often viewed as a tool for swaps, where users exchange one asset for another.

However, it becomes even more compelling when framed as a payment solution. For example, with Zashi leveraging Maya, users can send shielded ZEC while allowing the recipient to receive their preferred currency, such as USDC. This enables seamless, private, and flexible payments, bridging the gap between currencies and enhancing the utility of shielded transactions.

Josh said that Zcash on Maya will unlock a whole host of capabilities.

🏦| ZASHI VAULT

PeaceMongerZ led a good workshop about potential features and market comparison in support of Zashi Vault.

This was followed by a presentation and discussion on forum about media memos led by the Brave team. Then, a significant amount of the conversation shifted to questions of moderations and how to provide privacy and security while protecting users and the protocol from abuse.

THIRD DAY (SECOND WITH THE COMMUNITY)

Str4d led them through a session on NU7 ZIP proposals and current timeline, along with Daira, possibilities and timeline for NU8. All of them agreed on the benefits of the NSM and its inclusion in NU7, also discussing the impact of their work on Keystone on the overall timeline and the most optimistic timeline for NU7 activation, which was shifted from August to October.
Pacu provided an overview of the developer ecosystem with specific observations and recommendations for community documentation, which Josh believes that he will share with the community later.
Kit provided a good update the bridge between Zcash & Avalanche that he and his team at re-dev are building atm and the support being provided to them from the Avalanche ecosystem.
Emerson also announced a new project he is launching to become the Amazon of crypto with Zcash through incentives.

Later, they concluded the afternoon delving into ZSAs, how they work, how they will be supported in Zashi, issuers, trust, and the need for issuers ahead of the activation date drive adoption.

ECC’s follow steps in the days ahead:

Finalize and publish our Q1 roadmap
A forum post on the current NU7 schedule and implications
A forum post that describes a recommendation for governance, dev funding and implementation
Begin work!

Check Josh’s post for more details.

Some days ago, Vivek shared in the forum that the Zcash Shielded Assets ZIPs have been earmarked as being viable for inclusion.

After got a positive protocol audit from Least Authority, the ZSAs are now viable for inclusion in the Zcash Ecosystem.

QEDIT made progress demonstrating a working ZSA implementation on a customized Zebra Node, with stable circuit structure, finalized ZIPs, and an external audit confirming the integrity of the changes.

The team will focus on asset supply management, transaction verification in Zebra, ongoing maintenance of the zcash_tx_tool, and merging upstream changes across repositories, including adjustments will also account for NU7 components like PCZTs, Memo Bundles, NSM, and Fee Mechanism Updates.

7 days ago, Zcash Community Grants voted to approve the Qedit proposal and requested monthly updates via the forum thread.

Congratulations & we are looking forward to more coming.

Last week, the Zcash Foundation announced the release of FROST v2.1.0, which includes a number of important changes and improvements to the FROST reference implementation. This release introduces the frost-secp256k1-tr crate, enabling the generation of Bitcoin Taproot (BIP340/BIP341) compatible signatures. This plays a significant role for ZSAs, as BIP340 signatures will be used for issuing ZSAs.

Other notable features include improvements to the distributed key generation (DKG) protocol to support refreshing shares if a participant needs to be removed due to key loss. If the key is recovered, the original participant key set can still be used in a FROST signature round. The complete list of changes can be found in the v2.1.0 Release Notes on GitHub. 🐈

After the Z|ECC Summit Update, we got a new one called ‘‘Refactoring the Code’’.

Josh reflected on his early career experience refactoring complex, bloated code to emphasize the importance of tackling hard challenges, also bringing parallels to Zcash. He acknowledged progress made in 2023 and highlighted brutal truths about governance, adoption, attention, leadership, funding, payments, and technical debt. Josh notes that Zcash governance is inefficient and needs a simpler, resilient model to speed decision-making. He also noted that the community must engage more with the broader crypto market to understand and build for adoption.

Another point relates to attention—the coin price drives attention, and governance changes like PoS can amplify coinholders’ influence and provide yield. On leadership, the community must eliminate ego and infighting while attracting talented young leaders and maintaining high standards for execution. About funding, he emphasized prioritizing projects that attract users and exploring outside funding sources. Scaling Zcash for payments also requires strong liquidity, demand, and partnerships. Josh urges the Zcash community to remain steadfast, confront these challenges, and refactor the ecosystem to position Zcash as the solution for private, scalable, and censorship-resistant electronic cash.

Read the full post here

Zashi Updates:

🎨| Zashi Design

Adjustments and revisions to Transaction History Screens (Sent & Received)
Continuing design efforts for Balances, Shield ZEC, and Swap
Working with Richard on new app illustration asset

🍎| Zashi iOS

📈| Analytics Update:

Unique Installs: 6.11k
Total Downloads: 7.26k
AppStore Rating: 4.9*

Hacker House with the entire engineering team in Mexico
Transaction History Redesign:
Home Screen Transaction History redesign implemented
Built new screen for Transaction History
Built new Transaction Detail screen
Implemented new Transaction empty state for the Home Screen
Implemented logic for division into time periods
Transaction Filter logic prepared, UI for the Filters WIP

🤖| Zashi Android