You are reading the second article of the Z | ECC series. You can read Day Zero here

My morning started earlier. I couldn't see anything else than the hotel when I arrived the night before. My body was numb from all the flying and stressful situations I had lived in the past 24 hours. I kind of hate running. I have an utilitary relationship with that form of exercise. Yet I decided to go for a run. I was anxious to meet everyone, I needed to clear my thoughts.

The gaslamp quarter banner welcomes people to a huge convention center. I'm not a huge fan of those, specially the ones located nearby courses of water. I love the sea, and this huge golem of concrete was blocking the view. Good thing one could put it to good use as exercise staircases.

After my Rocky moment, I came stumped on this beautiful view of the San Diego Symphony Bayside Performance Park and The Embarcadero.

The lack of oxygen was probably because of the steep stairway but the view was also breathtaking.

The gaslamp district is basically what one would call "tourist bait" area. A historical recollection of what the city was once, preserved only in its "scent" to amuse the city's visitors. But actually, there's a catch: Gaslamp Quarter is also famous for its "paranormal activity". Which totally correlates to the opening that was chosen for the morning session of Z|ECC.

Day 1: All of these men are dead

What all these people have in common? they are all men, they are probably cold and have coats and none of them are actually alive to actually feel that sensation at the moment.

This was the opener of Z|ECC day one. We only have so much time on this earth. Every hundred years there’s a new batch of humans. Beings on the planet. But life goes on in continuity.

What is the legacy that Zcashers of today will leave to the zodlers of tomorrow ? What is the legacy we are today building on top of?

This last question was easier to answer: The Cypherpunk Manifesto.

This manifesto was Eric Hughes in 1993. To many this is ancient history, but believe me, it still fresh as it was written today. Look at the following passage:

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money

It shouldn't surprise any Zodler. Zcash is a direct product of the cypherpunk battle during the crypto wars of the 90s. Without those cryptography heroes there wouldn’t be any online privacy today. But that is one battle, the fight against oppression continues. Bitcoin, then once forefront of financial freedom has been captured by Wall Street. The dreams of Satoshi don’t reside on the blockchain he once created. But his legacy lives. We believe that it lives within Zcash.

What will be Zcash’s legacy?

What is the thing that we want to leave to future generations?

Will the zodlers of tomorrow inherit a better present than the one we have now?

How do we achieve that?

Are we focusing on the right stuff?

The crypto use case

We ask ourselves what is the real use case for crypto. Is it really happening now? Or does it only stop at the Defi casino that most of the VC firms are heavily investing into?

We believe that currently, there are three main use cases:

• borderless payments / remittances
• Purchase of morally sanctioned products
• Speculation

Going back to the cypherpunk manifesto, we believe that the first two are in our best interest.

Privacy, freedom to transact and freedom of speech are really tied together to the first two items, but we shouldn't object the speculation part either. Although, crypto has suffered a lot of reputational damage because of it - I'll bring that topic back later on- I would like to bring other optics to the "casino" point of view. The memes and the food-named exchange protocols dilute after the real use case: sovereign finance opportunities for the average folk. 

The moment a working class person in a highly-regulated, poorly administered and highly-inflationary economy is able to put their humble wage safe and way from the greedy hands of their rulers (no matter whether is government, corporations or both) everything its worth the effort and the pain.

Have you ever woken up to a 100% devaluation of your currency by decree/executive order?
Have you even been in need of a medicine that could not wait for western Union business hours payment clearing?
Did you ever need to purchase a personal item that suddenly became illegal (like abortion pills in the US) or be a legal risk in the future? ( birth control, hormones, cannabis medicine treatments).
Are you unbanked and have been denied cash as a payment method?
Have you been asked too many personal questions to just purchase a LEGO box or checking in to a motel?

Many people go through these kind of situations everyday. Will our doing make them whole? Will our legacy be worth to them?

Where does ECC fit in all of this?

ECC introduced the flywheel mode that ECC will be switching to for its operations. But not first asking themselves the difficult questions:

- Is ECC achieving all that it should?

• What is the first thing ECC should focus on?

Zcash is the crypto movement that can uniquely serve those use cases, the people behind them.

Looking for answers within Zcash core users.

Zcash users have been through a lot. Sandblasting wore out Zcash user experience in ways that left deep marks even in on our most loyal and fierceful users.

ECC and ZURE have been polling and running surveys on Zcash users for quite some time that is allowing them to plot lines and tendencies. According to recent figures, Net Promoter Score has improved significantly among Zcash power users. Also According to user surveys. NPS score of ZEC has been recovering from the negative scores that were seen in the times of the sandblasting. 

ECC’s strategy around Zashi, comes out from the power users survey: Users who transact in ZEC are better promoters than those who Zodl (hold). This is the main hypothesis behind Zashi product map. Empower users to have more ways to transact in ZEC, so that Zcash users who are better promoters of ZEC can drive adoption through daily usage of ZEC.

What is the Wallet Landscape?

In ZconV, the “Wallet landscape” panel was the most attended live event of the conference. It featured representatives from all major wallets: Brave, Edge, Unstoppable, Zingo, Ywallet and Zashi. What is the wallet landscape for Zcash power users?

According to what was presented during Z | ECC summit the usage distribution for early adopters of ZEC is:

• Exchanges 11%
• HW wallet 19%
• Zashi 27%
• Ywallet 28%


This is interesting because 1/3 of the power users surveyed are using transparent ZEC wallets as their main wallet (exchanges and HW wallets). Also, where are the Zingoistas? I know a lot of them! 

What are the features that these users most want?


1. Yield ZEC
2. Payment integration
3. DEX Support for Swaps from shielded wallets
4. Shielded Zcash support for HW wallets




One curious piece of data that was shared from the user surveys is that Zcash power users don’t care much about UX friction. They want more features instead.

Zashi Z | ECC Preview

The wallet team had a surprise for all summit attendees. A preview from the next iteration of Zashi that will include ZIP-321 payments using Pacu’s library (funded by ZCG) for iOS and Android, and the ability to top up a wallet from a very well Zcash aligned exchange. 

The ECC had a table full of swag, which summit attendees will buy using the Z | ECC preview of Zashi by scanning ZIP-321 QR codes that will pay for the corresponding swag. After purchases, ECC would reimburse them. 

The experience was neat and fund, but unfortunately quite affected by slow confirmation times of Zashi, which align with the Zashi user surveys data presented by The Zashi product team. Users want faster confirmation times. 

I was able to capture a video with a purchase experience which I’ll be sharing here




The day was progressing fast. After some delicious Lunch, EDGE was going to introduce their perspective on how Zcash is doing and where it should be going.

Living on the EDGE

EDGE is a not only a wallet, is a privacy-centered, multi-chain, self-custody, seedphrase-less wallet, that allows users to do fiat on and off ramps featuring three privacy coins, built using React native.

What are the biggest issues they faced with crypto?

• Scams, scams and scams
• Gas fees are hard to grasp for users
• L2 chain confusion:
  • People confuse ETH with is level 2’s
  • They don’t know which assets they have
  • Therefore they end sending money to the wrong chain (fund loss)

What are the issues that EDGE found with Zcash?

• Sync Sync Sync
• Address confusion (too many address types)
• Ability to buy and sell

What are the next steps for EDGE?

• Gasless swaps
• Strong focus on DEXs
• KYC / ID verification
• Educational content (YouTube and other material)

### 
What are the next steps for EDGE on Zcash

• Maya DEX / LP —> staking and yield
• Support for T & Z addresses

Although it features a lot of coins, EDGE is really aligned with the Zcash mission. They would be hosting a meetup on their premises on Thursday


The afternoon progressed and it was the turn of a major Crypto retail payments funnel to show the Z | ECC summit what were their plans for Zcash.

“Credit cards are held by bubble gum and duct tape”

This zecret provider presented the shielded and private path to better payments

Their theorem says that “a payment is an agreement between a buyer and a seller”. Which means that the money part is the least significant part of it. The agreement could be set in whatever mean-of-exchange that both parties agree on. This is what makes payments difficult on blockchain, because Blockchains are beats that move money around, payments on the other hand are about what it is exchanged.

“Better payments means centering on sellers”

One of the main findings of ZURE, was that Zcashers mostly want “more ways to spend ZEC”. This payment rails provider has found that the way to achieve that is not “educating merchants” about blockchain but working in ways that they don’t have to care. 

Credit cards have been always presented as a “convenience” element. But in reality “credit cards and credit score systems are a system of oppression” -thumbs up across all the room-.

The objectives of this company is not working around blockchain, but instead build from the perspective of blockchain, so that the merchant can focus on what they do best (selling their goods) and them can do what they best do, which is to provide privacy-centric, fast and reliable crypto payments that connect the crypto payment of a customer with the trad-fi account of a merchant while still protecting the privacy and the pseudonymity of the buyer.

They recognized that many crypto exchanges were approaching payments by leveraging pre-paid credit cards, but their intention instead is to make them unnecessary. Removing credit cards as intermediaries favor all other payment rails.

What ECC has learned from Zashi

Last presentation of this long first Z |ECC day, was about the lessons learned from deploying Zashi. 

according to the stores, Zashi has around 20-30 installs a day for each android and iOS, with a conversion rate of bout 25%. This means that from all users, one quarter of them stick around.

From their internal user survey, they’ve found that users dislike Zashi’s transaction speed and confirmation times, and how it slowly restore existing wallets. What users do love about Zashi is that it is a wallet from ECC, that has a clean and simple UI and it’s easy to use. 

What I’ve found interesting is that the “user requests” section of the survey results feature all the features that all the other shielded wallets do feature such as device authentication, dark mode, currency conversion, contacts or support for multiple account. My take is that the biggest challenge ECC will face is to actually include all of these features and keep the wallet “simple” which seems to be its strength. The other challenge is that the most wanted feature is “Earning yield” something that would actually imply changes that are beyond the roadmap of a wallet application given that the Zcash consensus mechanism does not provide such functionality. But this doesn’t mean that it cannot be achieved by other means like providing liquidity to a DEX or the loan-directed funding mechanism that Nuttycom posted in the forums

Although yield does not come without its risks and these should be communicated to users effectively. 


A comprehensive roadmap was presented for Zashi, but many attendees asked about the real throughput of ECC’s core team, given that there are many things to do but not so many developers to work on it. It was recognized that the biggest bottle-neck was the ability to review and merge code from both internal and external contributors. And that ECC will be working on finding ways to fix that problem and augment the capacity of the whole ecosystem.

Tacos El Gordo, the best way to wrap up an awesome day.

Although Zcashers tried, we couldn't get the teller to accept Zcash for payment. That's something that we need to keep focused on. But Hey. These were the best tacos I had in my life. Los Padres had played and there was indeed a line, but they had so much throughput that you'll be out with your taco within a blink of an eye.





Alright folks! So far for Day 1!