Zashi Onboarding and a Look at Its Privacy Boundaries

Transcript

Good morning, GMGM. Thank you everybody here for taking choosing [music] to spend your time at our third inaugural no. >> Yes. >> Okay. All right. Uh I'm Zucky. Uh I'm on the board of Electric Coin Company. Um we're going to be talking about Zcash. Uh and Zcash is first party wallet Zashi. This is pseudo and violet. Um, they're also going to be telling speaking, telling stories. This is very ad hoc. Audience participation encouraged. Um, you can also just yell at me and tell me I'm wrong about things. Um, so, you know, all all all all

good, all open. Um, and uh, cool. So, um, hopefully hopefully this is stuff that you're interested in hearing about. All right. I was trying to turn off my screen saver, but it's like not really. >> Hi, welcome. Welcome. We're just getting started. So, Zaki will be going through most of the content, and our role here is to ask questions when they come to mind. So is yours. Um, and toward the end, we'll have kind of a little fireside chat with Violet to share how she uses Zcash and how life was before Zcash.

It's gonna get very hot in here. [laughter] >> Yeah. Okay. I'm giving up. I'm just going to keep touching my screen until to keep it from dying. All right. I haven't given a a talk for my laptop in like a million years. >> Do you want me to load my on my laptop? >> No. No. We're good. We'll live. It'll all be fine. >> All right. So, what is Zashi? Um, Zashi is the uh sort of official electric coin uh uh company wallet, electric coin company built the first Zcash node um and has been a core contributor to the protocol for 9 years um and built a wallet after for many years Zcash had

wallets by third parties um that had let's say mediocre shielded support. Um and so the idea of uh building Zashi by Electriccoin Company uh and Zashi was released about 18 months ago um was to have something that really like showed off uh the best features of the protocol and it's become it's basically the best Zcash wallet right now. Um it doesn't mean somebody else couldn't build a better wallet. The code's all open source um but like currently is the best. Um so mobile force divine it's available in iOS and Android. Uh it shields transactions by default. Um and it supports uh orchard and chapling

which are uh uh two of the kinds of shielded pools. And then uh it is also responsible for the mysterious thing called number go up technology which is probably why we are giving this talk. Um [laughter] um so you know if you I think we we we're getting more and more feedback especially with all the attention recently um about you know how it how easy it is to experience Zashi as an as sort of a standard user but there is this like conceptual model that is very unfamiliar if all you know is Ethereum Salana on a that kind of thing

which is there are two kinds of addresses that you will see in your zashi uh T addresses and U addresses. Um and so a T address is um just like a bitcoin address. Um so Zcash started as a Bitcoin fork. Um and the idea was that the transparent system would be just like Bitcoin to make it easy for things like exchanges to integrate it. Um and then there would be the shielded system. Um that is you know sort of so you have uh uh visible transparent addresses and they're the things that like you will interact with um when you want to send funds to an exchange uh etc. Um hardware

wallet is more robust. Hardware wallet support is more robust. Um U addresses are called unified addresses. Um, and unified addresses are great because they can be um they've built uh they they bundle multiple address types. So like your wallet will automatically select the best privacy option. So if you like send a U address to a wallet that only supports Sapling, it will send funds via Sapling. Uh if you send it via a wallet that supports Orchard, it will support Orchard. Um and so you have this sort of futureproof uh uh address system. Um the other thing that is cool about so like Zashi will do this is every single time um you so you can you can give someone a

U address and they can keep using it as much as they want but every time in Zashi you copy paste a U address from uh every time you copy paste address it changes um so you're giving everyone a unique address um this is just um provides sort of additional uh uh privacy properties out of bound. So yeah, um there are lots of services that don't but like B and so basically when you open Zashi it will give you a T address um and if you bought coins on like Coinbase or Binance um and you're ready to shield them um you just put in that T address, send it there uh and then Zashi will take care of shielding

for you. >> Any qu any thoughts, guys? >> I have a question. Um, >> which one? >> There's this thing called a Z address. Where did it go? What if I see it? >> Okay, great question. Surprise question. [laughter] >> So, this is just pulling things off the top of my head. If anybody remembers differently please. >> It's a It's a legacy thing, so don't worry about it now. But if you interact with, you know, other wallets or whatever, you'll see a Z address.

>> Yeah. And especially or if you bought coins in like 2015, 2016 2017 2018 2019, you might have coins in a Z address and you're like, what can I do with these coins? Um most modern co like Zashi right now doesn't necess uh I think will support coin recovery from both sapling sapling Z addresses but if you have an very old sprout Z address uh Zashi currently doesn't support coin recovery for a bit um and it is not a simple procedure but we're working on it. It's like probably priority number one uh for for Zashi to support uh long-term coin recovery um from from all

previous addresses. >> Okay. So once upon a time [laughter] there was this uh there was so once upon a time uh a bunch of scientists, professors, academics um discovered this thing called snarks. Um and snarks have turned out to be this incredibly powerful cryptographic technology that enables scalability and privacy and but they wanted to make the like

bitcoin without the privacy without the without the uh linkability of all past transactions. So, Bitcoin has this fungibility problem. You know, you can see where the coins came from. You can see the whole lifetime of the coin from the time when it m and you know, and like addresses get tainted. You know, this was the Silk Road. This was Lazarus, blah blah blah. So, you know, this is like always been perceived as like a problem with Bitcoin by, you know, even Satoshi was like this. There are Bitcoin talk posts about Satoshi would being like it would be really nice if there was a solution to this problem. Um, so the initial version of of Zcash used uh an early version of like the first version of snarks in production

and that was called Sprout. Um, and one of the big problems that Sprout had was you basically needed a very powerful computer to generate proofs. So basically it was like desktop only. Um, uh, and at that time even 10 years ago it was like fairly powerful desktop only. Um, and so Sprout was great. Um, it had great privacy properties. Um, it also, it turned out, had a flaw in its initial setup. Um, that potentially could have resulted in um, uh, sort of like minting like unlimited minting of coins if anyone had exploited it.

There's no evidence that anyone ever has. Um but because of all of these things uh we ended up at this we like uh ECC over the course of uh the next you know 5 years 10 years 5 years uh kept inventing better upgrades. So Sprout initially had this initial trusted setup. Then Sapling was invented and Sapling had this great property of being able to be provable be you could generate proofs on on mobile phones um and had a much larger trusted setup. So instead of like 10ish people, it had like hundreds of people. I was in this I was in the sapling setup ceremony. Um then uh uh we eventually invented

orchard um which removes the trusted setup entirely. Um which I think has been like a big uh uh uh a big validation and has like preserved this property of like you can use this on standard mobile phones. >> Can I can I add a little bit to that if I may? Also, can someone turn me on a little bit more, please? Like, but like faster and harder. [laughter] >> A little bit more. Just higher. Thank you. So, okay, we'll see if that goes. So, so for what it's worth, when I describe the this because this is a question everyone gets, right? When they open up Zashi and they see these two address types, one of the things that I think is the simplest thing to understand is as Zaki is saying, the transparent addresses are just Bitcoin.

Every single thing you know about Bitcoin works with the transparent addresses. Exactly the same. It is literally Bitcoin, a fork from 2016. The U addresses, the U in the unified address is an encoding format. So inside of a U address, you have any number of basically arbitrary data that you are encoding other address types into. That futurep proofs the address type so that we can change the address type as we move forward in the future. >> The sapling addresses are beginning with the letter Z to say zero knowledge. Orchard addresses similarly. So the secret ones are Z addresses that you'll see. Exactly what kind they are depends on the decoding scheme that you're looking at. But Sashi's new I think it's zip 32 zip 3 something or other is the U addresses that simply encode what the

other addresses are. So you can go to zcash.space punch in a U address there and it will decode for you which addresses you're looking at actually and you can just use those either the orchard or sapling addresses that you have encoded in the U address and you can publish those as well. They will work. But the U address is basically a future proof encoding format for addresses. >> Amazing. >> Okay. Sorry. So that was wonderful. Um you answered a question I didn't know how to ask. Wonderful. But just to clarify from a user perspective, you only care about using a U or a T. Correct. >> And this all we show people in Zashi.

>> And then inside the U actually what's happened is there are different types of Z addresses. >> Well, there's just an arbitrary data encoding format. So you can actually encode whatever you want, but what you're obviously wanting to encode is an address to receive money because everyone wants to receive some money. So that's where that's what that's what that's primarily used for. >> Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. >> And then for your U addresses, there is this concept of a viewing key. in a viewing key allows a third party who has the right set of tools to see what happened in your transaction like amounts uh what address you know which addresses sent to woos that kind of stuff um but like when the transaction

was set what the amounts etc without having any ability to like move funds um so you can you can use viewing keys with various tools in the in the expanding viewing key uh uh ecosystem in order to like do things like generate like reports or like if you are uh if you are a you know like a an exchange or something that needs to be able to like view how many how you know a have multiple services that audit how many transactions like how much funds came in all of these things um can be done if you need to be able to prove to an exchange hey like I sent you funds uh or a merchant that I sent you funds you can give them a view and

What about viewing keys for T addresses? >> You don't need them. >> It's a trick question. [laughter] >> Okay, >> there's also a question back there. >> Um, Gemini is right now the only exchange that supports deposits via shielded access and their customer support people are trained. um to to know how to ask for viewing keys from users. Um if there are more.

>> Oh wow. >> Crazy. So al supports um accessing viewing keys. Um and yeah this is how any other questions about view and keys. All right. Okay. So um probably the so Zashi launches March of 2024 uh and we like fix lots of bugs. User experience improves all of the stuff.

Syncs get faster. All this stuff. Um but at the beginning of this year we launched this sort of revolutionary integration between Near which is another blockchain um which has a DEX called Near intents um that is integrated into Zashi um and what's very cool about it is that for the first time there was a way to get in and out of the shielded pool um on Zcash without passing through a centralized exchange. Um so unlike all of those other mechanisms where you were going to get KYC um entering and exiting Zcash now there is a very large uh on-ramp um that is doing you know $3 billion near intense as a whole is doing $3 billion

in volume um maybe about 20 or 30% of that is is in and out of Ze um but it's if you use it from within Zashi it just automatically so you can like you can move funds from ETH from soul from Bitcoin from US you USDC on many chains, all of which are supported by Neur intents. Um, and you can swap in and out and it takes you directly to as of this week, uh, in and out of the shielded pool. Um, and so you get very good fees. It's all integrated to Zashi, no KYC. Um, it is poss, you know, if you have funds on chain, it is the easiest way to get onboarded into the Zcash.

Um, and the and you know, spreads are very competitive with like what you would find in a centralized exchange. So near intense. So in a lot of ways when the near intense integration for Zcash and for Zashi launched that was probably the beginning of what we saw was like a like an like asmtoic increase in the use of the shielded pool. Um just because so many people found it much more useful. You could use it for so many more things. Um and we'll and then there's like a bunch of functionality that is built on top of near intense as a primitive um that we we're going to talk about. Any other question any questions?

But it's like it's very it's like a very simple thing where basically uh you like if you want to swap into Ze you go to Zashi uh you select like the swap function you swap into Ze it'll give you an address you can send to that address from Phantom or MetaMask or wherever. >> Yeah. It's possible because we do support the op codes for at like crosschain atomic swaps. Um, in general, crosschain atomic swaps have failed in the marketplace

because the user experience is worse than this. >> I think one thing also worth pointing out is that um the other asymtoic increase in the shielded pool probably comes from the fact that Zashi will force you to shield your funds and a lot of other wallets are beginning to do that too. So you're seeing auto shielding wallets that will require you that if you are going to be holding Ze in a self-custodial way, you will be doing it as a shielded amount of your value, right? So that means that anytime you are swapping in from a transparent cohen or token into Zashi's uh Ze, you know, holding Zack and Zashi, it will be shielded. Zashi calls this auto shielding, others do too, but it's also what they say they're forcing you to spend shielded funds. You can't spend transparent funds from Zashi at all. M

>> so the other um >> that actually confused me a little because I was like hitting the T address >> hoping I could spend from it but >> yeah no this is this is probably bad yeah this is in fact also one of the pitfalls >> well sometimes you know people don't accept you you want to send the tea >> and >> well so if you want so for example if you want to send to a centralized exchange like Coinbase for example they don't support any of the unified address formats and they don't support any of the shielded funds because of regulatory issues in the United States so if you wanted to send funds to, for example, Coinbase, then you would have to desshield it yourself, right?

>> But you can send so Coinbase will allow you to send from the shielded pool >> to Okay, so this is >> Dash will allow you to send from the shielded pool >> to a transparent address >> to a transparent address >> and that and Coinbase will accept that. >> Yes, because you are sending it to the T address. One of the things that we did, so specifically Binance decided that they could not accept sends directly from the shielded pool. So we created a new address type, which I don't remember what the letters are. >> TX um that Binance uses and Zashi does know how to do that. So it will do the >> It does not.

>> It doesn't. >> I just confirmed with Lucas. It does not. >> I thought it knew. >> Interesting. I think I think the the lot of your exchanges except for Binance, >> but the take the takeaway is that you want to be sending to you want to know who you're sending, what they're accepting. But this is true for any cryptocurrency, right? If I'm sending for example to a Salana network, if I'm sending USDC on Salana, I send it to USDC on Polygon, I've just lost my money, right? And this is true sort of within the Zcash ecosystem as well. And that's one of the easier ways to think about where you're sending to or from. So then the next system that we built is this cross-pay system. Um, so if you have a payment address like you would

see in like MetaMask, like any sort of invoice, you know, pay for your DevConnect tickets, etc., you can do that directly from Zashi. Um, and we support 20 plus chains. Um and basically what you do is and like basically this is a use of the near intent system but in this near intent system it knows rather than being like what is the market rate for swapping you know 0.1 ZEC for ETH it's figure it's figuring out how much ETH or how much USDC you need to make the payment and then figuring out how much Ze you need to to sell the swap to achieve that and it sort of makes that very user friendly.

Um, so it basically it allows you to do these things with no intermediary wallet. Like you don't have to like send funds to your MetaMask then make a payment. >> I also love crossplay. Crossplay is the one feature that took my workshops when I was teaching this down from about 10 steps to five because this is the one that makes you not have to do any math. You can just say this is the amount that I want the receiver to get no matter what. And if I am able to punch in like $50, right, USD, then the crossay system will calculate transaction fees for me to send to the decks and the other way around also from the decks back to the ultimate destination, the recipient.

We'll also translate uh a slippage tolerance that I'm setting to send more in case of a slippage between currency swaps. It'll send all of that value from my shielded funds and then the recipient will get exactly and only USD $50 at the time of the swap. any overages that I send to the DEX in order to make sure the swap succeeds, the payment succeeds, gets refunded automatically to me to my shielded address, which is beautiful because it means I can do it quickly without calculating anything in my head. So, it's basically a swap that like is a payment experience.

No, it's just a it's an ETH address controlled by a near smart contract. So no question because it goes directly into the shielded pool. >> So like the I guess the near intent system does see currently and it's like public on the near intent system what your uh uh like unified address is but that's it.

And there is some talk of fixing that one point. No, it will use a different one every time. So like every time you use newer intents, it will it'll grab a unique new unified address. And so like you won't be able like if you do if you have five different ETH addresses and you send uh uh funds to the same Zashi account, each one of those sends will look like they're going to a different Zashi account.

Um, but if you say if you and if you swap five times from the same ETH address to it'll uh it'll also plausibly look like you are sending funds to five differenti. No, this is it's all directly to the shielded address as of this week. There's that feature shipped on Monday [laughter] >> before what happens >> before there was a transparent address in between and that transparent address was fixed for every Zashi instance.

>> This is for the deposit swap or the crossay or both >> kind of both >> both cross pay and the swaps that are are powered by near intense. So crossay is simply a different UX on using near intense as a swap. you experience it as a payment because for a payment what you care about is that the receiver gets exactly what you said that they should get because that is the price that they are telling you you owe them. For a swap you're simply trying to ensure that whatever amount you get ends up uh you know at the rate that you want it in so far as you're sending a specific amount but you're receiving some varied amount.

That's the difference but they are both functionally technically implemented in exactly the same capacity when it gets to the near intense system. >> Can you go to the previous slide? >> Which one? previous traditional exchange. Yeah. Can you explain refund addresses? >> So in near intense when you are swapping from the Zcash side or well for anything near intense has to have an uh has to have a refund address. One use case of the refund address is you sent your funds but then no one was willing to process your swap. So near intents don't have like liquid. If you're familiar with something like unis swap there's no liquidity pool on near intense that what

there are is solvers on the other end. Anyone can be a solver. They publish a quote but then they actually have to provide the funds. So if the funds don't get delivered near refunds your money. It's like about 3 seconds um if the funds aren't delivered. >> So if there are more than two of these your transactions will be linked, right? >> No. >> Why? because um now your refund addresses are shielded addresses >> as of Monday. >> I see. Got it. >> Okay. So, we did cross pay. Okay. So, then this is another cool service within Ashi, which is the system that you can

um uh uh sign up for called Flexa. Um, and Flexa I think doesn't require KYC for like less than $500 in transactions. Um, >> they require KYC light, but you can just lie about what your name is and you can give them an email address that you can have like just, you know, some access to and they'll give you $750 a week. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Um, of spending power through gift cards that they provide. >> Yeah. So, yeah. Under $150. It's you can spend fund at payment at like ordinary payment terminals. You can buy a cup of coffee at a just like from a normal credit card uh swipe with Zashi. Um and the funds come directly from your shielded account. So again, no onchain

linkage. Uh you know, Zuko constantly will tweet about buying burritos and stuff. Um uh yeah, and so you can use Zashi as like an you know, if you do the KYC with with Flexa, you can actually just use it as like an ordinary like payment account for yourself, like a bank account, which is really cool. Um, it is. So, you go to >> electriccoin.co. >> Yeah. No, no, but like in the wallet you do more. You click more.

>> You click more on the far right. It goes receive, send, pay, and then more. And there's a Flexa button. Pay with Flexa. Uh that's probably because you got the app from the Froid store. >> Yes. And Flexa, it uh requires some non-free software that is not allowed to be accessed via the Froid store. So you have to download it via uh the Google Play Store if you want that feature. However, you also can use the crossay feature to go through things like Bit Refill or Piggyards or other gift card offramps. And that's another way to do effectively the same thing. Um or you can back a cryptocurrency uh a you can

use a cryptocurrency backed Visa card to offramp in a very similar way as Zachi is describing here. >> Yeah. So these are kind of the options for paying for things um out of Zashi, it's actually I think given how kind of under the radar the Zcash ecosystem was so it's actually like a surprisingly mature system today. Like it can do a lot of things. Um and so you know you can you can you can interoperate with crosspay you can interop you can use flexa you can uh you have you know exchanges that will there there are lots of exchanges unless you're a European basically you can get an exchange um that probably supports Ze

pretty well um and then uh there's also this uh BTC pay server is like a merchant app um that also provides uh like sort of a self-hosted pay with option Um, you we've been seeing things like VPNs and stuff like that using that. Okay. >> I think Nimvpn now you can pay for >> Yeah. Nimvpn >> with Zcash with your Zashi app. >> Okay. So, this is kind This is like the basic civilian how to use Zashi. Um, what most people would probably care about. Um, we're going to get a little bit into sort of more advanced topics.

Do you want to talk about anything else before we move on? Yeah. Um all right. So again you if your mental model of the world is Ethereum a lot of these concepts I think should be familiar. Um so like Zashi is a light client um which means it is syncing the chain and because uh uh uh uh your sends are encrypted right like the node that you're talking to can't actually decrypt your transactions. So instead there's this light client protocol that allows you to request block headers and transactions from no from from you know Zcash full nodes. Um and they send you these block headers and there and transactions and then you trial decrypt.

Um and you know there's a little bit of there's a bunch of hiding of network activity. Um but under ordinary conditions the operator of your light client um can see this network activity. They're like there's a device at such and such IP address that is you know syncing um you know that did come online uh that you know and so this leaves some trace of your Zashi activity on the network um so RPCs are configurable um if you are you know if you want to uh only trust yourself um you can run a self-hosted Zite client dnode uh the

software is all open source U but not the easiest thing in the world to run. Then there are a bunch of uh community members who are running Zashi infrastructure. Um and uh you know and that's what you would be syncing against by default. Um so like there's an automatic configuration where Zashi like tries to pick the best server for you um as you open the app. Can we look at some of these? So, in the app, you hit settings, the uh settings icon, advanced settings, choose a server.

>> Can you do you know these servers? Do you know these servers? >> Yeah, my friend runs most of those servers. >> Oh, wow. >> So, what you're saying is the the privacy leak is your friend. >> Well, this is why Zashi, what I tell people is that you should really just turn on tour protection, which is built into Zashi. So when you go into the >> we're gonna talk about tour in a second. >> Okay. >> Okay. So there is a rust implementation of a tour node called RT. >> Um and RT uh is was funded by uh partially funded by the Zcash grants committee uh which is part of which gets part of the block reward. Um and so tour is a system that uses this concept

called onion routing to hide your network activity. And basically the concept of tour is there are um entry and exit tour nodes and then there's a community of people who run tour middle nodes. And so basically when you connect to any server over tour, you send your request over the public internet to the tour entry node. Then it goes to a tour relay node which sees the entry node and the exit node but doesn't know where it came from. And then that forwards the request to the exit node which sees the middle node and where you're going but not where you came from. And given all of that we're able to make tour uh tour is able to provide an additional level of privacy to uh uh Zashi users. Um and

it can be enabled using advanced uh turning on advanced settings. And if once you turn on advanced settings, everything you do via Zashi, whether it's near intense or cross pay or all of these things are all happening over tour trying to think. So I mean it basically does it does give you a substantially higher level of um sort of network privacy um than than you would. And I also would say that like in my mind tour is not perfect. Um we would you know I think especially with all the attention and renewed like investment interest and

potential money for spending on new infrastructure that is in Zcash, we could potentially do more. Uh but I think this was a really good deliverable um from funding our the RD work um and also made tour a more sustainable project. uh because the original tour client is all a bunch of C++ code like C code that is extremely hard to maintain. Um so it was like good for the world, good for Zcash, not the perfect solution, but is definitely something if you are concerned about network privacy and want to dellink you know things that are the like how attributable your Zashi, you can just turn it on uh uh inside of Zashi.

>> Do you know how that happened? I was on the ZCG the grant committee when we gave that grant >> but it was the way it was described is tour needs to upgrade to rust that's all >> it did not say in the future we will do this for do you know how this happened >> so effectively what it hap what h like I mean for the part of it that I was kind of tangentially involved and like once upon a time I was more involved in tour haven't been involved for you know five plus years um but what I remember was it was like okay so we have this like giant bundle of C um that like only very few people were like really qualified to make changes to um it was like a complete nightmare especially as you

know tour is now more than a 10-year-old pro almost 15y old project maybe more like >> launched in 2002 or three >> yeah yeah yeah 20 plus year project like it's like it's old project a lot of the people who were developers in tour have all cycled out and moved on to the rest of their lives um and so there's been an ever shrinking population of people who were familiar enough to it. So that was the ask from ZCG. But one of the things that you get for everybody who's developed in Rust um and as the blockchain community has like encountered over and over again is Rust is a very flexible language. Um it's far more flexible language than than sort of other alternatives. Um, and that made it like really easy especially because

everything like all of the cryptography in Zcash that's in Zashi is all implemented in Rust. So once you have already built out all of this the whole like sort of tool system for integrating Rust into uh Android apps and iOS apps, okay, like we're going to add another Rust thing is actually like not that big a headache. And it, you know, conveniently turned out that RT was actually like very low developer effort to actually integrate which was really cool. >> Um, it was definitely part of the vision of RT that like it would be like a more embeddible and application got it >> use case like that was definitely part of the vision. Um, because like tour had historically mainly been consumed um through tour browser and again the

maintainability of tour browser was definitely in decline. Um and so like people like brave and all started wanting to embed tour but if you don't have a very like embedding friendly which the original tour tour client which was built you know was originally designed 20 years ago never really conceived of these use cases. So there's like this there was this >> have there been other high-profile projects that have been able to embed tour because of this >> I don't know. >> Cakewallet also embeds to in exactly the same way. Actually, you can turn on tour protection and a lot of some of these kinds of different like built-in apps already is intentionally a library that does it inside of other applications, >> right? Okay. So lots of other >> the real problem to be like extremely technical about why tour is not an ideal solution is if you

have like a panopticon view of the internet like if you're the you know if you have like a you view all the toos you can view everything um which like plausible adversaries have you can like see the network activity that looks like a zashi payment transaction going out and then be like, oh, it you know, like it emerged here and like you can probabilistically say like we think this payment originated from this film, >> right? Um, and it we could build systems. So, there are things called mix nets which would hide that information, but to tour is a good solution.

>> Yeah, Nim does that, right? Mix nets. >> I don't know. Yeah, Nim Nim is Nim is very similar in that capacity, but they also add a lot of what they call um a certain kind of jitter or padding or noise to the thing. Um it's basically tour like, but it has some advances in the fact that they're trying to specifically make this traffic correlation pattern a little bit more difficult to find >> for Zashi. a real important thing for using tour to assuming that you're hiding your IP address both from your ISP so that they don't know that you are using Zcash >> and that you are hiding your identity from your light wallet node operator. So

regardless of which which node you choose, >> they don't your the operator does not know who is accessing. My friend doesn't know that it's that it's you. And so it's really just like you you know you should consider like a first hop of a protection much like a VPN might. As Zach is saying, the traffic correlation issue is bad for a global adversary. However, uh as more and more of these are being added to the network, we're also adding more opportunity to run a Zcash lightnet wallet node off an onion service as well. And in that situation, you're never leaving the tour network and you have much less of an opportunity like you just further reduce the opportunity for traffic correlation in that capacity, too.

>> Yeah. So in general it's like more people who turn on tour from Zashi the more anonymity network anonymity everyone has which is good. Um and uh uh this is so these are the things. >> That's a good segue I think to the last more informal fun part. >> Yeah. >> You want to pull up a chair? >> Yeah. Yeah. I'll sit down. >> Okay. So, Violet obviously is an expert user of not just Zashi but the related like Flexa uh I don't know BTC pay ever.

>> Yeah, BTC pay server. >> Um and um like Zcash has been around a long time. Um so has crypto. I mean, you know, relative to other things. Um, but like one of the things that drives the people who build it, and we've come very close to the brink a few times. We've come within months of runway left, but you have these true believers who keep doing the thing they believe is valuable to the world because they truly want to build for people. I mean, they want to build for everybody, but especially people for whom private money is essential to their livelihood, their, you know, health and safety. Um, and I

think I what I would love is for Violet to tell us a little bit about how she uses Zcash. And I just met her a few days ago where she started to tell me very detailed instructions about where exactly to click in the Zashi app and in what situations. And I was really impressed by that. So, it' be really great to hear from you um how you use it, >> maybe how life was like before Zcash or or even Zashi existed. So, I think what we're trying to get to is that I use Zcash in my day-to-day life, not for investing. I don't really give a about the price of your coin tomorrow.

Whatever you promise me about the next week doesn't matter to me, whatever, like at all. I have only one care when I use technology, and that's what is the utility it gives me today because I have stuff I have to pay for yesterday. And so, if that can't be solved, I'm not interested in your technology. Um, this started for me with Zcash because I am a sex worker. And so for me as a transax worker in New York, one of the things that was very very very important was that I was able to get digital cash in a way that was undocibleable, uncharged backable, that you couldn't like, you know, retrieve from me once you gave it to me and that I could still do in a remote way. And so that's what digital cash does if it's truly private. Looking at all of the technologies out there, it

was clear to me that Zcash was going to be the best option because the encryption and the privacy schemes are by far the best and because of as Zaki is talking about the user experience in Zashi is bar none. Like it is topnotch user experience. So easy to use. So I started onboarding friends and clients to use Zcash with me for payments and for deposits that I needed to collect from men who were wanting to set up a date but you know I hadn't yet met in person yet. If you're serious about spending three hours with me alone and possibly without fully clothed, then I want to make sure that you put down a 20% deposit before you do that so we can spend our time together.

>> But hang on, Zashi only existed 18 months ago, right? Did you use a different wallet before? >> So before Z before Zcash and digital cash, we were just doing this with cash. Deposits were maybe and on top of that um like I was using things like Cash App or PayPal or any of the remote technologies that you would expect. Stripe, fiat services, zel, etc. These are all incredibly dangerous for me to use because if you for example uh have used Cash App for anything that's not just payto pay within Cash App, you might be asked for your KYC information. In March of this year, or I think it was April, Cash App started integrating with the Apple Pay uh wallet and Apple Pay has a lot more strict requirements for KYC. They also started changing our usernames, our our visible like the

names that we see for for who we are to each other on the system for us to our legal names. >> What >> which is incredibly negligible uh negligent in terms of a safety measure when we're talking about people who are doing this to collect deposits from clients who may be bad dates eventually, who may not want us uh who may not wish us the best. And so this pushed me and a bunch of other provider friends that I know in New York to really really care more about cryptocurrency. We were already using cryptocurrency for a number of things. A lot of um sex work advertising sites, a lot of different services online that we use only accept crypto because our industry is criminal in so many parts of the world. So we have to pay with things like Bitcoin in

the first place. Onramping from fiat to Bitcoin is a problem in some cases, but then once we pay, right, even that payment is public. So there's a lot of misinformation in my industry about like how much you're actually revealing how you're what what information is is public or not. Everyone not a lot of people thought Bitcoin itself was private. And so when I started looking at the block explorer and I started seeing the chain analysis tools and the various different literally open-source ways of just like finding out who is who um it became very obvious to me that Bitcoin was not going to be a great >> solution. I I personally never use Bitcoin at all for any reason. Never to hold, never to spend because it is not a private money and that is the problem

for me. I need to have privacy unless I because I cannot spend otherwise. >> Um so the point is is how do you add to that? Well, how you add how do you use Bitcoin like to pay for things if you if you if you are not private is you go through something like a Tumblr or a mixer or something that we know very well in the Bitcoin space. None of which are perfect. All of which have problems. But then the shielded pool as that size grows, right? Your anonymity set grows with it, but also you end up in this tunnel that you can basically treat as a funnel for making a private uh transaction even though you had some other public funds in the first place.

I'm not going to say anything about certain uh washing systems. I'm just going to say it disassociates my funds from where I'm going to spend them. That's all. And so that became a very important piece of the puzzle. And a lot of us started by just needing to pay for our ads. So when I, for example, want to have an ad listed up online, I need to pay for that in Bitcoin, right? Because that's what they support. The prevailing advice was on-ramp on Coinbase, send to a self-custodial wallet like Exodus or Trust or whatever other wallet you want and then pay from there. But that creates a onehop transaction graph like difference between the source of the on-ramp, my KYC Coinbase account, to where I'm spending my escort ad. Now, it's known to the public Bitcoin network that this escort ad is being paid for by

this particular KYC account. Do you see the danger there? That's incredibly incredibly risky. More so on Bitcoin than it was on a credit card. I would rather allow be allowed to pay with a pay for my escort ad with a credit card than I would on Bitcoin. >> Why? Because at least with a credit card, only Visa and the vendor knows that I've made that payment and the bank, right? on Bitcoin, every single person looking at the blockchain can see where I started from the KYC account if they can get that information from the exchange or the bank and they can see that I paid for that that escort ad on the service that I'm buying without ever asking me a question, without ever looking up records, without ever doing a

subpoena. That is an insanely terrifying notion for so many people in my work. And so going through something like the shielded >> stupid question, it is terrifying because what? because it's very simplistic to be able to identify the spender and the and the on-ramper. >> So you're saying the on-ramper can say okay this person engages in sex work I will ban you. Is that the fear? >> Yes that's exactly right. People have been debbanked. I mean I have have a bank account frozen. Um it's it like what I'm trying to say is that the belief is that if you go through a exchange and then go to a self-custodial wallet, send your your funds from an exchange to a self-custodial wallet, then you send to the to the service,

right? You have one hop of >> sure of distance between when you're getting where you're getting the money and then what you're spending it on. But as we all know from any network analysis, a single hop in between uh a route is trivial to deanonymize, right? So that doesn't make any sense >> with AI. Yeah. >> Yeah. Do you >> Yeah, sure. Oh, that was my last question.

>> That's correct. Yeah, >> I have been told it was, but I don't know. >> It is supposedly a I do know the details of this. >> Okay. So the the storyline was it was a priority to change it because we were going to do rotating transparent addresses for refund addresses for crossay and intense and then int shielded refund addresses got happened like at an insanely fast rate like way faster than anyone was expecting. So it's now no longer tier one priority to have rotating transparent addresses right now >> um because like the usage surface area has decreased a lot um for them

>> well because most of the usage is through near intents right like >> and central yeah I mean so it's basically just centralized exchange onboarding now that is doing key addresses um >> I was so excited to see the unified address swap uh refund address feature released on Monday that's I I cannot believe how quickly it shipped it. The near devs are insane. Like Alexi like wait every when we like when it was like engineering spec it was like this is like two or three months of work and Alexis's team did it in like two weeks.

>> Wow. >> So yeah it's crazy. Um >> anyh who so the more shielded addresses there are obviously the better. And this is exactly the the point is that I would I would love to see other service providers also accept shielded addresses. I know Cake Pay um allows you to pay for gift cards via shielded addresses as well. Um >> do you hold your Zach or do you like do you huddle it? >> Um I mean so so I've been getting paid in Zack for about a year for the various fun times that I have. Yeah.

>> And >> that has gone very well for me [laughter] in the past two and a half three months. So I will say that's been nice. >> That was never the intention. >> Sure. Um, a lot of people are afraid of volatility for a lot of reasons and I understand that like as a concern. >> But you use it for your daily life, >> but it is my daily transacting. Yes. Most of the things that I use now, most of the way that I transact in the fiat world is through a cryptocurrency backed wallet um of some kind. About at this point over half of my net worth is cryptocurrency. Um, and it's not again it wasn't intended to be an investment, >> right?

>> Um, it was just intended to be uh a checking account basically. I kind of treated Zashi like my checking account, but it was just backed by crypto. And the thing about the volatility is that if you transact quickly, volatility doesn't matter, right? If I get paid $500 USD, as an example, but then I have to spend $500 USD on rent or utilities or groceries or something, and that happens within an hour, then I'm not really worried about volatility to the to the degree that so many people who are investing are. And 99% of people don't have money to invest in crypto. 99% of the conversations at this conference don't matter to most of the people that I know and they never will because we're not interested in the portfolio management aspect of this.

We're just interested in making this useful for our lives like in a day-to-day capacity. So volatility while it's probably the number one question I get right from people who who who who really don't have anything to care about volatility because they would just transact immediately right volatility I say but isn't it volatile and I say yes but if you are spending what you earn within about a day right then the volatility matters less an hour even less five minutes even less the second biggest question is what about liquidity and near intense has basically just answered that question for everyone which is beautiful for Um and now it's easy to go from one to another uh cryptocurrency uh and then offramp from there. So both of the biggest questions that were posed right

by by people who are uh in my industry and trying to survive on a day-to-day basis are are answered in in that way. The volatility matters less because we need to transact much more than we need to invest. And then the liquidity is not as hard as it was before the near intent system came out because it gives us a off-ramp and an OMAN from dozens and dozens of other cryptocurrencies. >> Cool. I think we're coming toward the end. More questions. H.

>> Nope. Nope. you. >> So, >> the keystone is the best wallet to use. It does unified addresses, no problem. Uh the ledger, what is the current status? >> It's coming. >> It's coming. They they it only started coming again in since the Zcash went this way. They never supported shielded addresses. It was only T. And then there was there were some issues such that you can't even move your tea out of an old ledger.

Um but given the renewed interest they have applied for a grant. It's been I think approved. >> Yeah. >> Uh and they will be working on it. I I if not I think they're going to be losing a lot of customers. Sorry. >> Is it a retroactive? >> Yes. >> Is it done already? >> But >> no. So they have to ship it and then they get the money. >> Oh, I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. >> Right. Right. >> Okay. Huh. No, Treasure never has uh Yeah.

We paid Treasure, but they didn't ship. Okay, cool. Sorry, I wanted to This is reminding me what I said about Binance was not accurate earlier.

Zashi, I believe, will write, you know, create the right signatures or recognize the text address and send it to Binance. But if your Zashi is connected to a keystone, the keystone cannot create that text transaction. >> Yeah, >> that's what I remembered, too. I don't have a Binance address, but >> Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. [laughter] Yeah.

>> I I don't know if there are plans to change that. I don't It's kind of edge case. Yeah. >> Yeah. question. Hello Yeah, I mean I can I can say what I know

about programmability which is so right now the most widely used bridge for Zcash is uh the is the near bridge. Um so there's like near bridged Zcash on Salana near bridged Zcash on Ethereum is going to la on like Ethereum arbitum and base are are all going to launch soon. there was an effort to try and get it done by dev connect but didn't happen. So I think it's like it's like if I remember what the launch is like a week or two away. Um then um so that launch is coming. Um there is Near also like Near has a lending market right now that supports Zack. Um so you can borrow

against Zack. Um and there's more Near lending markets for Ze uh coming. Um, and then there's this effort to put a uh like a Starkware snark stark verifier um in the in the Zcash L1 which seems to have a lot of support and people seem to be roughly pretty fairly excited about which then would open up like a lot more different uh programmability pieces >> like what like what could you do >> like more DeFi basically with better trust assumptions. Um, and then you know, hypothetically, you could also have like a noir to you could go like noir Cairo to Zcash

>> like Okay. Well, so there's like I mean in general Ze is becoming very programmable very fast and Maya shipped and Maya just got shielded address support too. Um I do not know I the No, I do know that if it's not there already it's supposed to be there soon.

We want I mean one of the things that we one of the reasons why all of these things are good is in order to make Ze a long-term trustworthy like store of value the shielded pool a long-term source of privacy. Um and the best privacy comes from holding assets in a shielded pool and then kind of like not touching them for a very long period of time. So you want people to do that. People need to know that there are going to be many different on and off ramps. So if we can sort of enable an environment in which there's many different ways to get in and out of the shielded pool, the probability that all of them will be closed off becomes very small, you know. Uh and so that's a that's a thing that we're is like a real sort of mission of like I don't know the

Zcash community, ECC, Zashi, etc. But we want to support everything. And so like you know I you know the red bridge the uh uh Maya you know none of these things are from our point of view should be disadvantaged like all of these things are hugely additive as they come online. We want you kind of want to have all of them in zashi but like there's all obviously there's going to be usability complications because they don't all support the same semantics. But yeah, I mean having just having bridge ze in more ecosystems is also going to be really

>> but when when they're bridged they're just native they don't have any privacy >> unless the ecosystem has privacy. >> Which of these that you mentioned? >> Um so we have some amount of amount encrypted ze in on salana right now because there's a a near sana dex called encipher that has encrypted ze. So that's happening. Um, and then um I mean there's just like not that many like I mean on on Ethereum you can shield anything and rail down.

>> So on that exchange on Salana what what do you do that's private? >> It's called encipher. >> Yeah but like all trading is private. >> No, there's just like you some fraction of trading that goes through some small fraction of trading that goes through cipher. >> So I could have private Zach and privately trade for something else. >> Yeah. >> Oh cool. But amount privacy, not metad not address privacy. >> Oh, okay. Okay. Like like it'll be clear who I'm trading against. Yeah. Okay. Got it. >> Okay.

>> I think we're good. Thank you all for coming. >> Yeah. I hope this was valuable. [applause] >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you, Zaki. >> Yes.