Zcon4 2023
as the organisers put it
Zcon4 is an annual conference organized by the Zcash Foundation, with a focus on Zcash and privacy-preserving technologies.
who it's for
zcash core developers, cryptographers and zero-knowledge researchers, protocol engineers, wallet and mobile app developers, security engineers and auditors, community and grant managers, privacy and civil liberties advocates, blockchain researchers
topics
Halo2 circuit changes; shielded transactions and pools; Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSA); private proof-of-stake tradeoffs; threshold signatures with FROST; multi-party threshold cryptography; Zcashd and Zebra node engineering; shielded address mobile wallets; lookup tables for proofs; secure distributed storage; dev fund governance and grants; regulation and policy for privacy coins
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Address | Jack Gavigan | 07m |
Argues that financial privacy is essential and frames Zcash as a practical tool to prevent global transaction surveillance, citing the ZK stack as the… | ||
| Ecosystem Updates | Zooko Wilcox, Jonathan S. Rouach, Jason McGee, Jack Gavigan | 01h 01m |
High shielded-transaction load prompts major engineering work: Zcashd optimizations absorb a 10x scale increase, then proportional fees deployed reduce… | ||
| SoK: Programmable Privacy | Ying Tong, Daniel Benarroch | 48m |
Phase one write-up catalogues protocols (zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, threshold homomorphic encryption, FHE, and TEEs), evaluates what each actually enables for… | ||
| Getting to Gilead: From Surveillance to Control | Michelle Lai | 31m |
Traces financial surveillance from 19th‑century private detectives and credit bureaus to vertical filing cabinets, teletypes and computers that centralize… | ||
| Zcash Has No Morals | Ian Sagstetter | 30m |
Argument: moralizing privacy slows adoption, so focus shifts to concrete steps that grow real usage and earning opportunities. Proposals include decentralize… | ||
| The Essentials of Practical Privacy | Naomi Brockwell | 59m |
Argues that financial privacy is essential and lost in modern rails, and shows concrete tools and failures: use privacy coins (Monero’s ring signatures and… | ||
| Zcash Ecosystem Grant Funding | Alex Bornstein, Michelle Lai, Josh Swihart | 46m |
Recent history and concrete proposals: the Zcash grant stack runs ZF minor grants, ZCG major grants, and an ECC–Filecoin program that had a $5M pot and spent… | ||
| Protecting the Fundamental Rights to Privacy and Civil Liberties | Kurt Opsahl | 29m |
A proposed U.N. cybercrime treaty aims to replace the Budapest Convention and adds sweeping provisions that would force disclosure of financial and identity… | ||
| Zcash Sustainability and Resilience | Zooko Wilcox | 28m |
Argues that the current dev fund slices (reported as 80% to miners, 8% to ZCG, 7% to ECC, 5% to Zcash Foundation but with the Foundation practically… | ||
| Town Hall: The Future of Zcash Funding & Decentralization | Jonathan S. Rouach, Andrew Miller, Jason McGee, Zooko Wilcox, Josh Swihart, Ian Sagstetter, Jack Gavigan | 01h 20m |
Dev Fund ends next year and the panel argues to renew it but change how it works: keep the 21 million supply cap, add jurisdictional resilience, and let a… | ||
| Town Hall - Technical Roadmap for Zcash | Jonathan S. Rouach, Andrew Miller | 01h 30m |
A working ZSAs alpha testnet exists for issuance and transfers, but fee rules are unresolved and a large PR must land to merge ZSAs into mainline nodes; a… | ||
| Can Private Proof-of-Stake Blockchains Obtain All of Safety, Liveness, and Privacy? | Kartik Nayak | 30m |
Shows that private PoS cannot simultaneously guarantee safety, liveness, and privacy when an adversary can delay messages: network-level delays let an attacker… | ||
| U.S. Policy and Regulatory Updates | Paul Brigner | 29m |
Recent developments center on the Ripple ruling that finds XRP not a security at summary judgment, the Coinbase suit alleging 13 tokens meet the Howey test… | ||
| Zcash Global Ambassador Lightning Talks | Amber (aka ambimorph) | 01h 01m |
A report on the Global Ambassador Program explains concrete results: Brazil wins a $2,000 ZCG grant, runs six paid ambassadors, runs three Discord airdrops per… | ||
| Security Engineering: Zcash Ecosystem Security and Learning From Safety-Critical Disciplines | Taylor Hornby | 57m |
Year‑long grant work audits Zcash ecosystem wallets, deployments, ZIPs and hardware integrations and reports concrete results: 83 bugs found, of which 41 are… | ||
| A Road Map for Lookup Tables | Arantxa | 32m |
Road map presents concrete tradeoffs: Caulk and Caulk+ turn static preprocessed tables into lookup arguments at the cost of a temporary table-dependent step… | ||
| Interactive Design of a Zcash Trailing Finality Layer (Hybrid PoW+PoS) | Nate Wilcox | 01h 01m |
Workshop proposes adding a Zcash hybrid PoW+PoS “trailing finality” layer using an idealized trailing finality oracle then a real PoS finality Gadget, with… | ||
| Growing the Zcash Community | Jason Rogers | 40m |
Grassroots groups coordinate concrete actions: ZecHub runs a task board that pays 0.75 ZEC bounties for design and content, but had to rate-limit tasks when… | ||
| ZGo: Year One | Rene Vergara | 38m |
ZGo receives a ZCG grant (approved June 2022) and builds a working non‑custodial payments stack: a web‑based POS plus ZIP321 QR payment URIs and live fiat… | ||
| Halo2 circuit changes for Zcash Shielded Asset and Atomic Swaps | Constance Beguier, Pablo Kogan | 54m |
Implementation details for Zcash Shielded Assets: Orchard value commitments gain a variable asset base point so asset type is included in commitments, note… | ||
| Zconnaissance - Sketching a Shielded Assets Future | Vivek Arte | 17m |
Proposes a concrete voting protocol using Zcash Shielded Assets: issuer mints unsplittable finalized ballot tokens and transparently issues one per eligible… | ||
| Zebra Update | Pili Guerra, Arya Solhi | 24m |
Zebra adds a multi-threaded RPC server that doubles initial sync speed in one bug fix, publishes a Docker image and crates.io packages, and mines a testnet… | ||
| State of Legislation, Regulation and Policy | Jack Gavigan, Paul Brigner, Kurt Opsahl | 50m |
FTX collapse drives a yearlong policy crackdown and many post-crisis bills miss the real problem, for example proposals targeting unhosted wallets that would… | ||
| Ziggurat | Mark Henderson | 26m |
Ziggurat reverse engineers the Zcash network protocol and runs a daily suite of ~120 conformance, load and fuzzing tests against lightweight synthetic nodes… | ||
| Free2Z Caterpillars | Jonathan Bird, Skylar Saveland | 28m |
Free2z is a Zcash-native creator platform that actually works: thousands of Z pages, live streaming, uploads and serialized series, and case studies of… | ||
| Secure Distributed Storage | Anca Nitulescu | 31m |
Describes a concrete proof-of-useful-space pipeline: slow, CPU‑heavy initialization that encodes data into an incompressible replica using depth-robust graphs… | ||
| The Zcash Foundation AudioVisual Club: Empowering and Amplifying the Zcash Community | Ryan Taylor | 35m |
A grassroots club launches regular monthly meetups, weekly workshops and a Discord hub to train creators, repurpose ~130 Zcon talks into short clips and… | ||
| How to Build a Shielded Address Zcash Mobile App | Paul Puey | 33m |
A step‑by‑step demo shows a React Native app built with react-native-zcash that derives a spending key, derives a view key, creates a shielded z‑address, and… | ||
| ZSA Interaction Workshop | Pablo Kogan, Vivek Arte, Alexey Koren | 27m |
A working alpha demonstrates Orchard Zsa on a local V5 node fork: a Python script spins up 3–4 nodes, generates blocks, and exercises new RPCs so a doctor… | ||
| Nighthawks Roadmap for Zcash | Aditya Bharadwaj, Matthew Watt | 22m |
Nighthawk lays out a mobile-first roadmap: a relaunch of the shielded by default wallet in coming weeks, a five-person core team, and prior delivery of… | ||
| Educational Challenges in the Ever-Evolving Space of Zero-Knowledge | Luis Brandao, Mary Maller | 33m |
Timeline of concrete advances: recursion and folding (Halo, Nova, hypernova, protostar) enable proofs of proofs used to aggregate overlapping BLS signatures in… | ||
| How to use FROST (incl. Demo) | Conrado Gouvêa, Deirdre Connolly | 32m |
FROST is a two‑round threshold Schnorr scheme adapted for Zcash with re-randomized FROST to hide signing keys on‑chain; code is released as crates on crates.io… | ||
| Design a Proof Of Solvency protocol with Halo2 Workshop | Enrico | 45m |
Workshop shows how to build a Halo2 circuit that implements Summa’s zk proof-of-solvency: assets are committed on‑chain via exchange signatures, liabilities… | ||
| The Zcash UniFFI Library | Luca Campobasso | 32m |
Eiger builds a UniFFI-based bridge from the Rust Zcash crates into Ruby, Python, Kotlin and Swift, shipping key handling and HD derivation, support for unified… | ||
| Overview, Feedback and Opportunities re the NIST Call for Multi-Party Threshold Cryptography | Luis Brandao | 42m |
NIST issues a public call (NISTIR 8214C draft) for reference material on multi‑party threshold schemes, with a revised call in 2023, a virtual workshop… | ||
| Become a Creator on Free2z and Publish Your First Page Workshop | Jonathan Bird, Skylar Saveland | 45m |
Hands‑on workshop that walks through how to create a Zcash wallet, publish a Zpage on Free2z.com, and accept payments with a demo Ywallet transaction that… | ||
| FROST Demo | Conrado Gouvêa | 08m |
Live demo shows a FROST-signed Zcash transaction posted to ZECpages: a prebuilt transaction plan JSON from a view-only wallet is hashed, a coordinator… | ||
| Wallets Working Session | Aditya Bharadwaj, Pacu, Joel | 34m |
Compared six wallets (Edge, Nighthawk, Sashi/secant, Unstoppable, WhiteWallet, Zingo) by creating a wallet, funding with t‑funds, loading into each, then… | ||
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