Potential Zen Improvement Proposals

General
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There are some ZenIP’s that we’ve discussed on Discord in the past, and I am intending to write some ZenIP’s and submit them to the DAO for considerations. Wondering what people think of the following topics.

  1. Take the private voting protocol and make it into a usable system that can be used by paying a small fee in ZEN to setup a vote. This would involve creating and hosting a DeFi front end for voting, like with tally.xyz, or the system used for the most recent ZEN DAO vote.

  2. Creating a ZEN grants organization that formalizes the request, evaluation, and award of proposals from the community.

  3. Making a payments system for ZEN on EON that can be used with a mobile device, in a mobile wallet

  4. Clarifying the reporting and transparency requirement of the Horizen Foundation. If a ZenIP is voted on by the Horizen Foundation, would like to be able to know who voted for and against it. Also other information pertaining to which proposals are prioritized. This may be already part of the DAO, but want to make sure of it.

I know I’ve proposed lots of other things on Discord, if there are others that you remember discussing, please let me know.

It is probably useful to have votes on many different topics to more closely align the priorities of the Horizen Foundation with the Horizen community

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  1. Looking ahead to quantum safe algorithms. Is it possible to implement these throughout the horizen software stack?

Perhaps a research project and then an implementation.

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HL will soon be presenting some quantum resistant components of “New Horizen” :slight_smile:

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I’d love to see more ZenIPs come through for DAO vote. It’s a new program, I get it, but now’s the time to start seeding the system with ideas. Some select comments on Rolf’s prelim thoughts:

  • The Horizen Foundation is working on a Grant Program already and I know that @TurtleBear has had a big role in it. I’d like to learn more about what’s going on first, but then I’d also like to see a ZenIP codify budget and process.
  • @blockops can you expand on the ZEN on EON payments system for mobile wallets?
  • @blockops I think the DAO Constitution and supporting docs specify quite a bit, but I don’t think that how specific Special Council members voted is part of it.

One idea I think could be a good ZenIP is a budget to support IRL events, like meetups people can put on around the world for Horizen.

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IRL events budget sounds good - I remember we ran some of those a number of years ago. They would definitely need to be rolled out slowly, and attended by someone who has been working with Horizen for a while to make sure we are getting value. Some of the ones done in the past I believe ended up just being sophisticated ZEN grabs by enterprising people.

Even though HL is working on something, does not mean someone can’t propose ZenIP for something similar. It is a way of moving forward the things that interest people.

ZenIP’s and votes do not need to be on major changes. We can take advantage of the bike shed effect to motivate people that are already part of the Horizen community to create a Metamask wallet with ZEN.EON on it to use for voting on minor improvements.

Bike shed effect:
> The bike shed story tells of a management committee’s decision to approve a nuclear power plant, which it does so with little argument or deliberation. The story contrasts this with another decision on choosing the color of the bike shed where the management gets into a nit-picking debate and expends far more time and energy than on the nuclear power plant decision.
>
> Karl Fogel, a renowned engineer on the topic, describes the issue as “the amount of discussion is inversely proportional to the complexity of the topic that has been around for a long time.” (From The Express Tribute)

The bike shed effect (also known as the Parkinson’s Law of Triviality) is an issue commonly known in corporate and consulting circles. While the idea originated from the corporate world, it is relevant in personal development too.

This was copied from https://personalexcellence.co/blog/bike-shed-effect/

Anyway, what I would like to encourage is for people to participate by making many smaller ZenIP proposals. This activity in itself will encourage people to use EON.

Once they are using EON, these same people, in aggregate the owners of 14 million ZEN, or $140 million of ZEN, will start to have reasons to move this ZEN to EON to stake to forger nodes, set up liquidity pools, and use lending protocols. Yes this is just a way of using ZEN to get more ZEN, but there will also be other uses coming, whether it is playing blockchain based games with people you meet in a gaming guild in a metaverse, or jointly buying into a business in a way that allows for the share to be easily observed and monetized through loans or resale.

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Hello Blockops.

  1. I’d love to see a private voting protocol by Horizen. We should have the resources for that. But if the proposal is made by the community, will HL be able to develop it. How should we process?

  2. There is a grant program being built, I’ll ask the project manager to ass you on the next calls if you want

  3. Yes, yes, yes. Community needs a mobile wallet. I don’t know if Horizen can build a wallet like Portal from MultiverX, or partner with them. But for now, it’s the more seamless experience I had with a wallet. They totally rocked it!

  4. Yes, and have a history of votes made?

  5. Yes. at least start to brainstorm on power voting with the community. I know several community members who can’t put too much money on ZEN but are true believers and have followed us for a long time. We can’t forget that it’s way easier for some people to invest in ZEN than others, and the money invested does not necessarily reflect the efforts and engagement made for the ecosystem.
    I believe in a more democratic DAO

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Zen Grants sounds interesting. Do we have something like Gnosis on EON, to create multi-sig wallets?

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That’s a good question and point @Manon about whether HL would pick up certain projects if they were passed via ZenIP. It depends! One way it could work is that a ZenIP could propose some idea with a fixed budget that, if passed by the community, authorizes that budget for the work. Then companies/devs can put together proposals to bid on the work, and maybe the proposals go to another vote to see which one is awarded the contract.

There are plenty of things I wouldn’t have much interest in HL working on, mainly because we’re not the right company for some things, and because we have scarce technical resources that I’m always going to want to deploy to their highest use. I’m open to anything, but the things I consider of highest use for the HL team are in protocol dev, things like upgrading to Horizen 2.0, upgrading EON to make it more performant or attractive to devs, etc. We’re not really a wallet, tool, DeFi, bridge, etc. company; though we have dabbled in most of the above and could certainly handle some things if they make sense in the grand scheme. For many things, the ecosystem would be better off attracting other dev groups.

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I’m also curious about what the community would like to see re: a mobile wallet. We already have several third party mobile wallets, and I just verified that MetaMask works really well with EON on my mobile device. Beyond being able to receive and send $ZEN, what else would make building a dedicated Horizen mobile wallet worthwhile?

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Yes but we had problems with Coinomi for example. And I know some users had problems with Guarda.

I had to change 4 times my wallet to use ZEN on my mobile + the restaurant accepting ZEN had to change it 2 times too because of deprecated wallets/ supports.

We don’t have today any mobile device to perform forward transfers. That won’t be an issue when we will be able to buy ZEN for the EON chain directly on exchanges but I am not sure about the ETA on this.
We will always have mainchain wallet users.

Best would be to have Cobalt on desktop and mobile and be able to do FT and BT with that. So we can be also sure about the information we give to the users so they use well their addresses, we can also ping the users more easily via the wallets for airdrops/ big news.

We are an ecosystem and I don’t think we should count on third-party wallets. We are too huge for this, IMO.

More than we need a great ecosystem wallet, we deserve it. Also for brand recognition.

I know it’s a pain to maintain :'D

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I see your point of the Horizen ecosystem not counting on third-party wallets because reliance on external wallets means the operations are contingent on the performance and uptime of the third-party service. Any downtime or technical issues faced by the wallet provider can disrupt the project functionality.

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1 to 3 sounds pretty good and interesting, would love to see it if its not there already , but 4 to me not a good one :slightly_smiling_face:

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some quantum proof ZEN in the future? yes please

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some kind of 2 factor authentication on mobile and transaction simulation (for simulating outputs - similar to Rabby Wallet)

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HL will be proposing a Horizen 2.0 upgrade that includes, at least partial, quantum resistance :slight_smile:

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What do you all think about a great ecosystem wallet?

Not sure it’s technically possible, but I see something:

  • Usable as MetaMask to connect to dapps / web3 platforms (should be compatible with WalletConnect);
  • Perform forward and backward transfers (seamless experience for users), that’s also permit us to inform better the user, so he learns at the same time);
  • a wallet usable for Forger Nodes and Super Nodes (with added description / information);
  • we have a better possibility to inform our users (send notifications);
  • we don’t have to rely on third-parties for everything and always have a solution for our users.

Positive:

  • Brand recognition
  • Seamless experience for users
  • Better understanding of the Horizen ecosystem
  • A new way to interact/ notify/ inform our users

Negative:

  • The cost to maintain
  • Really, only the cost

SBH, Cobalt and the BT dapp don’t do the job today (users need 3 different tools to use Horizen now…)

If we only count on exchanges to permit users to buy ZEN living on EON, there are 2 problems:

  • We kind of forget our mainchain users. What message do we send here?
  • They don’t learn

it’s good to have a way to buy ZEN living on EON directly from exchanges, don’t get me wrong, but that can’t be the only way.

Please, please, get us an ecosystem wallet

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I’ve wanted a Horizen mobile wallet for years, and still do. With as much work as we’ve done on wallets for the community, and as much research as we’ve done in crafting a wallet strategy, we never pulled the trigger on building a Horizen mobile wallet. I’d still love to see one and it would be the marker for a certain degree of ecosystem success when we get that far.

That said, wallets these days are much diff beasts than they were in 2017 when we were contributing to several of them. Nowadays, entire companies are formed around single wallets, as it really does take those kinds of resources and dedicated focus to make good ones. They’re products and should be treated that way. In our early days, we had a college student write a mobile wallet in a weekend. Needless to say, it requires much more effort these days.

If the community thinks this is a great idea, it should solicit bids from experienced wallet companies to see what they can do and for how much. It’d be a good exercise one way or another.

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Sure,

We need a specialized company to do that.
And the cost is a problem, that’s a huge cost to maintain. And even with all the benefits that may bring, ROI is very hard to determine in advance.

So, it’s a bet on a lot of expenses.

If someone has an idea on how to mitigate the costs, I’d love to hear that

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Good point about the maintenance costs…it’s a big cost to create the first version and then to maintain it and improve upon it to be a competitive / useful product. Maybe @rocket has some ideas on wallets and could help craft requirements. We’d also be willing to pitch in on requirements generation and share whatever research we’ve done thus far on wallets from the HL side. Other than that, as of right now, HL isn’t staffed or sized appropriately to take on a big wallet product, but there are others who do this for a living and I’d bet we could get some interesting proposals if we reached out.

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Rereading what I wrote, it was confusing.

This was about getting regular reports from the Horizen Foundation about activity of the director, special counsel, and specific reasoning by people on the Foundation if a ZenIP was proposed but not brought to vote.

Since we are still in early stages, it is probably better to wait and see what the regular cadence of Foundation reports produces.

It had nothing to do with identifying the people who vote on ZenIP’s

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