Recap of Zecrey AMA in Persian channel

Thanks to our community ambassador Hadi(ind.iust.h#7473) for helping us organizing this special AMA event in Persian channel in Zecrey Community, and publishing the recap article here: https://medium.com/@MoneyPoney/recap-of-ama-zecrey-3c38b08a84ff

Below is the AMA details.

Zecrey team held a special AMA for the Persian community.

AMA Recap

This AMA was held on March 3 at 9:30 UTC in the Discord channel of Zecrey. In this meeting, Lumos was present as the representative of Zecrey team and Hadi as the representative of Persian community.

At the beginning of the AMA, the most important questions of the users were asked one by one and Lumos answered them. Hadi also translated the answers into Persian for the users at the same time.

In the second part, some of the users’ questions that were asked during the meeting were selected and Lumos answered them.

At the end of the AMA, a form was filled out by attendees so that a POAP designed by Zecrey’s team would be sent to them soon.

Part 1: The most important questions

1. Trust and security are very important for the project, so what is the audit status of your project?

Now our auditing work is ongoing and we have Certik to audit our contracts and zk circuits code as well as Slowmist for auditing our wallet code. We are also planning to have more auditors in the future.

2. What do you think is the most important competitive advantage of Zecrey over other existing platforms?

Zecrey aims to address two core issues: multichain isolation and privacy. Zecrey is positioned as a private cross-chain protocol along with multichain asset management solution. In terms of privacy protection, Zecrey uses a privacy solution based on the account model and zk, which is different from the UTXO-based implementation of Aztec, ZCash and Monero. Zecrey privacy protocol applies a more cutting-edge algorithm and can achieve an L2 privacy experience. Compared with Tornado and Aztec, the user experience is more friendly. In addition, in Zecrey L2, users can enjoy a seamless transaction process with their privacy protected in all the L2 transactions.

In terms of cross-chain, the privacy cross-chain bridge provided by Zecrey is more secure than other cross-chain bridge solutions, and Zecrey also offers privacy protection. Zecrey provides native AMM DEX in L2, which can facilitate cross-chain swaps of any assets for users.

3. Could you clearly say what is the advantage of your protocol over AZTEC?

AZTEC is a privacy engine for Ethereum, enabling confidential transactions over public mainnet. AZTEC uses zkSNARK proofs to provide privacy and scaling via zkRollup service, which is the main innovation. Although zkRollup plays an important role, it is not unique here. Zecrey utilizes Twisted ElGamal encryption to keep the privacy of the account, which is a friendly scheme for BulletProofs and Sigma Protocol. The benefits of both Sigma protocols and zk-SNARKS are being exploited in Zecrey, which make Zecrey an excellent privacy design.

Also, AZTEC lacks interaction tools and relevant infrastructures while Zecrey supports NFT collection display and is developing functions like staking and farming. In the future, Zecrey will be able to support more dapps on multiple chains.

Moreover, Zecrey provides a more friendly user experience and realizes the millisecond-level computing privacy proof.

4. Does your project have a plan for launching a token? If so, when will it be approximately?

Yes, Zecrey token is named REY and it will be launched soon in Q1 or Q2 2022. Stay with us for more related updates.

5. What are the greatest challenges the Zecrey Protocol team are facing at the moment?

The most challenging part for now is how we build narratives. The fact is Zecrey protocol has many different features and different users with various demands. From the perspective of the product, Zecrey offers a wallet which supports multiple Layer 1 public chains and it is easy to use for managing assets across different chains. But the most complex functions we offer are Layer 2 features. As we always say, Zecrey is an L2 privacy protocol based on zk-rollup. We could help users do private transactions and move assets in a private way between different chains. So we have different angles to tell the story, and for each point, we have put a lot of effort into making it work. And for now, we will leave this question to users to select. And all components we provide could be combined by users themselves. In a word, Zecrey protocol is a complex system and how to make it match different users is a valuable consideration.

6. Do you have a plan to expand your wallet on other chains like Solana, terra, Other L2 Layers of the Ethereum?

Yes, first we support EVM-compatible chains and then we will support non-EVM chains like Near, Solana, Terra etc.

7. A good user experience can retain users more and more sustainably. What efforts has Zecrey made in terms of user experience?

There are several considerations for user experience. As you can tell from the product we have released, the first point is we have the design more intuitive for users to try out. And also considering Metamask is the most popular extension wallet in crypto, we have made the L1 wallet usage similar to Metamask. And speaking of L2 wallet, it is very easy to use too. Even if we have privacy feature, users do not need to worry about how it is enabled because all transactions that happen on L2 are private naturally. The second point is how we improve transaction efficiency and reduce cost. The third point is when you transfer assets on L2 or do swap transaction on our L2 DEX, it is super fast and at a low cost. In terms of privacy, it is also more efficient than other protocol. We only take 1~2s to generate the proof, which is imperceptible for common users, while others will take ~20s to generate proof.

8. How does Zecrey protect the security of users’ assets? What is the mechanism?

In general, Zecrey’s L2 is based on zkrollup where its security is rooted in L1, like Ethereum. We don’t have permission to control users’ assets. The essence of zkrollup is we will build users’ transactions offchain and finally post it to L1 along with the valid proofs.

9. When working with testnet, sometimes the speed of working with the wallet is low, and after depositing, the tokens are placed in L2 with a delay. Will this problem be solved in the mainnet?

Yes, we have been working on improving the issues revealed in testnet. And it will be more smooth when mainnet. Actually, you can find that we have fixed many issues for the current testnet.

10. Some of our community members encounter the “Network error” when activating the L2 account. Is there a solution to this issue?

This is an issue related to DNS and we have updated it. Now it should be good to go.

11. Does the project team have a plan to raise more capital or collaborate with other projects and VCs?

We will announce our latest fundraising news soon. And yes, we have been talking with different projects for collaboration. Now it is not the best time to share the info, but we will announce it when it’s settled.

12. Do you have a plan to implement the wallet on Android or iOS?

Yes, we have considered Android/iOS wallet but now our top priority is to get our main features done and launch our mainnet. And extending to non-EVM chains is also more prioritized.

13. Is your project going to work on a DEX in addition to a wallet and launch it?

Zecrey’s L2 has an embedded private AMM DEX and it is also permissonless DEX.

14. Do you have an estimate of the TPS (transaction per second) in your protocol?

TPS is around 300 for now and it will be increased when we launch our Prover Network which aims to boost the efficiency of proof generation.

Part 2: New Questions from Community

15. Some users ask if there are any incentives to test and provide feedback on the testnet?

We haven’t announced specific incentives mechanisms publicly. But we have considered several forms of incentives to those who joined our testnet. One of them is to claim the poap which is going to launch soon. And another is our drop of new series of NFT. Based on the NFT we issued, we will launch the NFT staking pools, where users could stake the NFTs they have to get some credit tokens. For now, the details have not been settled and there is tons of work to finish before it launches. When it is done, we will announce it on our official Twitter and announcement channel in discord and telegram.

16. Some users ask if the testnet will have a new phase or will you go straight to the mainnet phase?

Yes. As you can tell, we launched the testnet for our extension wallet, which supports multichains assets management and Layer 2 functions for private transactions, including transfer and swap as well as crosschain bridge. Those are the main features for Zecrey now. And we will announce another phase testnet for our new form of product, which is a web app. The link will be: https://app.zecrey.com/, but for now it is still under development. With Zecrey App, users could use the Layer 2 functions via connecting Metamask. In terms of mainnet launch, there will be several steps. First we will release our layer 1 features for multichain support, and we have already got auditors working on reviewing our Layer 1 wallet codebase and it will come to launch soon. For layer 2 features, the codebase is also under auditing and it costs more time to finish the work. So it will be ready after Layer 1 features for mainnet. In short, before we launch the mainnet, we will open our testnet for our web app. And launch features for mainnet step by step.

17. Some users stated that the transaction fees in the testnet are high. Do you have a plan to optimize transaction fees?

There is some misunderstanding that the transaction fee is high in our wallet. For Layer 1 wallet, when you sign transactions, gas price mainly influences the total transaction fee due to the gas cost for each transaction is almost fixed. So the only issue is whether we could make the gas price close to the right gas price on blockchain now, which is fetched from etherscan. Basically, Layer 1 wallet only helps you to manage transactions. When we opened our testnet for extension, there was some time we had an issue for handling this calculation but we have fixed it.

In terms of fee on Layer 2, it is pretty low all the time.

18. In the world of crypto, one factor that plays a very important role is advertising and marketing and creating the hype that every project does in a certain way. What do you plan to do?

Zecrey protocol is an infrastructure layer and it is not like other Gamefi or Metaverse projects. So in terms of advertising and marketing, we have cooperated with other flashnews and media platforms to spread the info about Zecrey. And also we mainly focus on building relationships with other solid projects, like we have announced cooperation with Chainlink. Besides, as a part of BNB Chain MVBIV, it is also a way to get people aware of what Zecrey is. Apart from the basic operations we do, we will also try to design a narrative line to tell the story closely related to Zecrey protocol based on our NFT series, where you have seen that we have fairly launched the Avatar NFT. More to come and the strategies we follow will be evolved along time, stay tuned and subscribe to our announcements.

19. Will Zecrey wallet support NFTs and can we mint NFTs on L2 networks like Arbitrum?

Yes, we will. And now we have some use scenarios for NFTs within our wallet, e.g. set up your avatar when you have some NFTs. And in terms of minting NFT on L2, that is what we will do next stage. For now we will focus on private transfer and swap and crosschain bridge within our Layer 2 first.