Ok. So you think POSSIBLY this was done in the past in the case of 0x, but that it’s definitely not the case now.
This seems like a pretty vague avenue to be exploring and I’m not sure if it’s super valuable to the thread. Do you have answers to any of the other questions ITT?
For more specific info I would suggest asking him directly or reading through his thread. I was not involved in his grant/work.
There’s related discussion in the ZOMG Update 1-20-2021 and meeting minutes thread.
I sometime feel the community is way smarter than everyone 
Slight deviation but I like to point out that MGRC (Major Grant Review Committee) was created to fund larger teams dedicated to improving Zcash. IIUC, smaller grants are to be made for ZF but the larger grants would be applied at MGRC. I believe ZF grant is still open for business.
There are some interesting & valid points made here & in other threads about longer term support for piece of software written by the developer and making sure it is used by actual users. You can break it down into three components: base fee + long term support + rewards based on user growth milestones
Is anyone working to answer the questions in this thread? The linked 0xarbitrage thread seems loosely related, but doesn’t really answer anything.
I remember an MGRC candidate asserting the idea of award prizes - “funds awarded to people or organizations that deliver important code | documentation | marketing artifacts | presentations | etc after the fact.” I love the idea but it didn’t seem to get much traction.
I just read this interesting article which is about a related question in the funding of scientific research: Nintil - Fund People, not Projects V: Fund for longer?
It’s still something we’re considering! We’ve been getting our basic processes in place for accepting grants first. It was @cburniske’s idea I believe!
I ended up spending a ton of time in the forums around the Zecwallet application and Sarah’s resignation, and Zbay has had a bunch of big features that are stuck waiting for release, so I was taking a break from the forums and am just getting back into it now.
Sorry for the slow reply!
Heh, my life would be a lot chiller if this were the case! I assure you, Zbay is real!
It just isn’t that good for anything yet, because account registration and messaging is slow and unreliable. 
We’re working really hard to fix that.
Want to make a time to test it together when it’s ready?
We are way behind the timeline decided on our Zcash Foundation grant, though we’ve only been paid out for milestones completed, so we aren’t sitting on any unused / misused community funds.
A big part of the grant was for a user research project with some formal constraints, so I ended up prioritizing acting on the initial results of the research—which pointed strongly in the direction of users needing a private Slack/Discord replacement more than they needed a strictly anonymous messaging tool—rather than completing all of the formal pieces of the research specified in the milestone. Once the research laid out in the grant was underway it was clear what we needed to do, so I just focused on doing it, rather than on the grant.
And again, because the grant was focused on milestones and broken up into deliverables, ZF has only paid us for work completed.
Looking at how Zbay’s Zcash Foundation grant went is actually a great segue into answering your question.
In my own experience with ZF, I think there’s a positive and negative side to the overhead that came with the grant application process, and that in my case the positive outweighs the negative, though for other projects the balance could be different.
Positives:
Negatives:
Overall, encouraging projects to do user research, threat modeling, and security audits made my work stronger and seems like a good idea overall.
I think as far as structure and oversight goes, my guess is that it’s helpful for the default applicant, but that it might be burdensome and overwhelming for some applicants.
I’m curious what the Nighthawk folks think, since we ended up funding them, and since they’re in a similar situation to Zbay and Zecwallet. @aiyadt
I agree that it’s super important to put projects in a position where they can iterate, rather than funding “1 and done” projects.
There are other approaches to address this problem too. Funding lightwalletd infrastructure for an existing application is an easy call, since we know it will get used.
Another easy call would be work to add a feature to an existing application. Unstoppable and Zecwallet’s applications fit in this category.
I think there’s two things here that are sort of separate. One is grantwriting, like actually writing up a really “good” application and one is the work/patience to go through this process.
I don’t think we actually care that much about “grantwriting” per se at all, beyond just being able to understand what the person is proposing and the substance of what they’re proposing. If you tell us what you’re funding.
But getting 5 elected committee members to understand the substance of what you’re doing, why it makes sense, respond to their questions, and incorporate their feedback is going to be some work, especially for projects that are complex and important. They don’t have to be good at grant writing, but they do have to try to understand our questions and respond, which might take a couple rounds of back and forth. I wouldn’t call this red tape, since red tape implies kind of arbitrary technical hoops. It’s more like the inevitable communication overhead you have with a new collaborator, such as a new team member or an investor.
We’ve talked about doing this back-and-forth over phone/video calls but this can be time consuming too.
And I’m actually open to agreeing that this is too much work for some applicants, or a waste of their time.
I think the answer to your question is to have an alternate kind of grant that’s a “fellowship”. In this grant, people apply based on who they are, what they’ve done so far, and loosely based on what they intend to do. Some applicants might feel more comfortable with that, and there won’t be as much back and forth. If it was explicit that I was making the decision as to whether to fund the person and trust them, I think I’d be comfortable funding someone without completely understanding what they intended to do with the funds, based on their past track record (given a high bar for “past track record”).
Agreed re: this. ZF was funding 0x’s work for a while, which was really helpful.
And I see they’ve hired him full-time now!
Zecwallet has been funded pretty significantly by ZF. Given the small number of projects ZF funded, and given how useful Zecwallet is, I think ZF deserves a huge amount of credit for their role in supporting Zecwallet. Being an effective funder is hard, and ZF was just getting started.
Another grant that lead to something (but it was just research—Tor needs more funding to complete the work) was Walking Onions, which is a necessary step to using Tor by default in mobile Zcash wallets without excessively slowing down connection and sync times.
This is super important for network layer privacy, which is a big existing, unsolved privacy problem for Zcash. My understanding was that they figured out a solution, in the course of the grant-supported work. So I think this was definitely worth funding and should be seen as a success, even if they haven’t yet found funding and time for implementation. Hopefully Tor (or someone) will apply for more funds to implement this in Tor and add Tor to the Zcash lightwallet stack.
Even if Zecwallet was the only thing that really seemed like it was working (so far) that would still be pretty good.
Also, @Blinky — did the decision to fund Nighthawk’s lightwalletd proposal make sense to you? Does this seem like a valuable use of funds?
Hey Holmes, thanks for the impenetrable reply.
Yes, funding Nighthawk makes total sense to me! Thank heaven we still have some wallet developers! Hopefully now that they’re done grant writing, they can add ZIP321 URI support.
I hope your optimistic hand waving and quantified intangible gains turn into great results. I really really, really, really. Really. Truly do.
Hi @_eric ,
Big +100 for empowering ZOMG to think outside the “grants” box and consider awarding prizes, and also consider setting bounties on things they think are important.
I believe @cburniske first floated the idea of awarding prizes (post facto) for kick ass contributions. This model has worked well in the Decred ecosystem and I’d like to see ZOMG feel empowered to do the same.
One obvious choice for such a prize would be the Unstoppable team, which leveraged the ECC’s Android and iOS SDK’s to bring first multi-currency shielded Zcash wallet to the world not long ago.
The wallet looks great, works well, and even has native Tor support on Android! The Bitcoin wallet seems to be a legit SPV client, and the “Academy” content within the app is truly outstanding as an educational resource for new (and even experienced) crypto users.
When teams like this show up and start delivering awesomeness, @ZcashGrants would do well to reach out proactively and work to encourage further collaboration, cooperation and innovation.
I’ve been taking a break from the forums for awhile, but I came back to see quite a few folks picking on the ZOMG both here and on Zecpages. Let’s be patient, and give ZOMG time to get their sea legs and realize their potential. Any new team needs time to form and norm before they storm, so let’s be gracious and give them some space and time to figure things out. We have some truly outstanding people leaning in and giving us their most precious resource (their time) by serving on ZOMG, and I believe that they will have a meaningful and beneficial impact on the whole project over time.
Stay positive,
DC
Just to clarify, the recent Nighthawk funding was for hosting lightwalletd.com servers only, not wallet development. @NighthawkApps is still funded till end of March per the original Zcash Foundation grant and there are a few deliverables to take care of. We currently have a grant for building a reliable Block Explorer open, following which we plan to apply for a larger long term grant for native wallets development. ZF Grants - Zcash Block Explorer
At EthCC, Vitalik gave a talk “things that matter outside of defi” and he mentioned the idea of retroactive public goods funding. Has @ZcashGrants considered more the idea of post facto rewards for projects that do succeed, perhaps looking at projects that are still viable several years after the initial funding?
if we had a treasury the size of the Ethereum Foundation… 
funding Nighthawk makes total sense to me! Thank heaven we still have some wallet developers
Very related idea: Retroactive public goods funding
I feel zcash is lost in the space and needs to realize they are late