By Elise Hamdon
This is our fortnightly community and communications update; last week’s engineering update is available here.
This week’s Comms update is dedicated to featuring some of the amazing content presented at Zcon1. Kudos to The Foundation for organizing and to all who contributed time and talent to make this event the best conference of the year. Joyce Yang posted a testimonial in the Global Coin Research newsletter, “It was honestly one of the best conferences I’ve been to this year and meeting an inclusive and high-quality group of scientists and technologists in the space.” Attendees and social media posts echoed this same sentiment. Congratulations to the entire Zcash community for forwarding important discussions through thoughtful engagement during this conference.
Here is a recap of content the ECC team contributed during Zcon1:
@nathan-at-least talked about high level scalability, setting the bar high by stating “I think we should try to make Zcash usable by 10 billion people by 2050 if we can. We should try our best to do that.” #10Billion
@Daira complemented the scalability discussion by presenting about the technical aspects, including an exploration of the design space for scaling Zcash using recursive validation. Hir talk included an overview of obstacles to making this approach work in Zcash and a strawman design for full transaction validation in SNARK circuits. [Edit by @daira: I didn’t get to the performance estimates; those will be on GitHub at some point.]
@str4d followed with Creating Shielded Transactions on All The Things, which was a look back at what’s been accomplished, where we are today and a discussion about the work that remains.
@lindanaeunlee was back on stage again this year presenting about the current state of wallets in the Zcash ecosystem. Linda highlighted common trends, new features and leaders in the space.
@ebfull presented a deep dive into Sonic, which boasts fast verification and small proof size while maintaining a robust and secure parameter setup process.
An amazing selection of workshops followed to close Day 1. Workshops were not livestreamed, so sadly there are no links to share. However, here are some of the topics:
- The Zcash Reference Wallet: Hands-on with the Android SDK (@geffen and Kevin Gorham)
- Scaling Blockchains — Parts 1 &2 (@Daira and @nathan-at-least)
Day 2 workshops included an opportunity to reframe the narrative so that privacy
becomes an expectation of digital currencies. @joshs led this discussion during the Evolving Beyond the Privacy Narrative session.
@Dodger joined the transatlantic privacy panel with Monero Konferenco, which discussed the regulatory environment for privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies. Panelists included Sarang Noether, Erik Voorhees, and Jerry Brito from the Konferenco in Denver, Colorado. Peter Van Valkenburgh, and Amber Baldet joined @dodger in Split. This panel wrapped Day 2, but an action-packed Day 3 awaited.
Day 3 kicked-off with a presentation by @zebambam about responsible disclosure in cryptocurrencies, outlining the current state of security practice in cryptocurrency, the dilemmas Zcash has faced, what our answers have been so far, and a call to action.
As the day—and the conference—drew to a close, both @zooko and @acityinohio’s presentations were greatly anticipated by all. I’ll leave the recap of Josh’s talk to @sonya, but am thrilled to share a link to @zooko’s ‘State of the Electric Coin Company.’ Zooko made some exciting announcements and provided transparency into company finances, mission and plans for the next few years. #AllInOnZEC #10Billion
Zcon1 was a happy gathering of friends and colleagues across the Zcash ecosystem. Kudos to The Foundation for making this conference possible for us all!
…And while Zcon1 was in progress…
Guarda wallet announced shielded is now mainnet! Private Zcash transactions are now available on Android. Download the app in the Google Play store today!
Zecpaperwallet announced a Vanity Address Generator for shielded addresses! Generate addresses with 4-5 character prefixes in just a few minutes.
