Zcoin Community Meeting #8 5th September 2020

Published on September 9, 2020 by Michael "Muggles" Bernhardt

Lelantus Cryptographic Library Audit Results

Raised (5827.5 XZC) about over USD 20,000+ for the Trail of Bits Audit cost.
All fixes to the issues have been incorporated and reviewed by Trail of Bits.
Lelantus cryptographic library code is also open sourced and available to the public.

Development has been completed and final review of PRs are being done by our lead developer before deploying to testnet.
Halving will happen before Lelantus binary release on QT wallet before the Electron GUI wallet.
After Lelantus testnet, approximately 4 to 6 weeks to be activated on mainnet.

Discussion on Zcoin bug disclosure
We were on bitcoin core v13.0 and inherited a bug from bitcoin core v0.14 (which was only patched in bitcoin core v16.3). In order to exploit this bug, one would need a rogue miner that have enough power to solve a block
With assistance with the mining pools, We deployed a hotfix as soon as we detected the forged coins and manage to freeze half of the amount and the remaining were identified on exchanges.
Discussions with exchanges are being done to deal with the frozen assets. Reuben suggested the funds to be sent to a burn address and taken out of the supply.

A temporary spork was suggested to be implemented to counter any hacks that might happen in the future as a precaution
It allows the core team to turn off and on certain feature like Lelantus and chain-locks and acts an emergency brake
Proposed for this feature to expire after a period of one year from the time of activation. This is to ensure the maturity of the technology.
Will take around 2 weeks to develop and will be different than Dash. It will be a simple feature to send a message to disable a feature on a consensus level and turn it back on later.
Forum poll shows an almost unanimous decision in favor of having a this feature to be added but addition feedback is highly welcomed.

Will happen on block 302438 (approximately 24 September 2020)
Block Rewards will drop from 25 XZC per blocks to 12.5 XZC per block. This will be the biggest drop in inflation in Zcoin history
Founder and Seeds rewards will cease
The new block reward percentages will be 50% to Miners, 35% to Znodes and 15% for development. Although the percentage has increased for development, the amount objectively has not increase much to maintain the same level of development funds because of the halving.
There is a discussion of a Reserve funds concept where in any point of time which Zcoin price goes up and the monthly development funds exceeded 100k USD, any excess will goes into a separated reserved fund which only will be used in specific circumstances such as code audits, bug bounties or a subsidization of core development if the price of Zcoin does goes down. Reuben suggested a revisit of this further down the line as for team to further expand, 100k USD may not be sufficient but will gradually seek community approval for this.

A rebrand has been discussed for years with community feedback and we are moving forward for a rebrand to be revealed around the same time with Lelantus
New name, logo has been chosen and a .org domain purchased.
New name is 4 letters long, ties in with our burn/redeem mechanism
Ties in with our burn/redeem mechanism
Logo and branding design works are done. New website are being worked on with restructure and clean look. Wallet rebrand.
The decision was made for a rebrand to breathe fresh new air into the project and to prevent any confusion of our coin with other projects which has continued to happen today.

Zcoin is working into integrating into the DeFi ecosystem which will bring greater utility to Zcoin
Zcoin has partnered with Stakehound and expected to launch early October.
It will unlock liquidity of Znodes and bridge them into DeFi.
Stakehound is about allowing Zcoin that is in a Znode to be represented as a token on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC20 token.
The ability to have stakedXZC allows a lower entry level for those who do not have 1000xzc to make a Znode and still able to get returns from it. It also allows it to be traded while continuing to earn returns.
Can be tested on Ropsten testnet. Can request testnet stakedXZC from Stakehound team

Ongoing forum poll. Weigh in your opinion!
MTP has served its purpose however it is a massive blockchain bloat
There have been reliable sources that people are seeking to develop FPGAs on MTP
ProgPow is favored because block time can be reduced with not much bloat.It has been audited and implementation work is not heavy. It also retains the GPU mining community.
RandomX was also suggested which is much of CPU focused but subjected to botnet farming.
A merge-mining with XMR was also proposed which would give greater exposure and a new privacy focused community to reach out to, but it also means relying on XMR for security and serves as an airdrop for XMR miners with no clear way for existing Zcoin miners to participate due to its CPU focus vs GPU focus.

Sproxet; an anonymous developer that has work on privacy preserving software for the past 15 years and contributed significantly to Zcoin’s Electron client. Founder of Signal Eleven, an IT consultancy which focuses on computer security and auditing, software development and cryptographic systems architecture design.
Rustam Abrahamyan; full stack developer but his passion is on front-end development and is experienced in ReactJS and Angular. He graduated with a degree in Mathematics: Computer Sciences from the Yerevan State University. He also enjoys experimenting with music and audio processing, 3d environments, gaming and virtual reality.

A chain swap was proposed due to current chain having so much legacy code on board and bloat. A chainswap will enable us to be on a clean code base without having to deal with several legacy privacy protocols, mining algorithms and workarounds that we had to do over the years.
This will make our project much easier to develop on. Sync time will be much faster and overall a better experience.
Several ways to do a chainswap. Brief discussion of options.
A chainswap will NOT happen anytime soon and proposed to be done next year. Further discussions will be done in the forums.

Bad news; Everything has been completed. However, Edge wallet is in the process of totally changing their code base making the work that has been done incompatible.
Some of the work can be reused. To turn into an SDK format so that it can be implemented into any wallet and will be easier to use and not dependent on a single wallet provider.

To take another look in the future once they have clarity of regulations regarding privacy coins.