Boggerster for the ZF board

[Boggerster]

I hereby nominate myself to serve as a member of the Zcash Foundation board.

A little background on who I am, my motivations, and what I expect to bring to the table.

29, European Citizen, residing in Europe, fluent in French, German, English.
I first came into contact with crypto back in 2014, started taking it seriously around 2016. From Feathercoin to Namecoin; from Colored Coins to ERC20s; from DeFi to generalized compute, I’ve witnessed how most endeavours fail(ed), only very few survived, and even fewer thrived.

Only 2 projects deliver on what I wish to see in crypto: Ethereum (& ecosystem) and Zcash.
I’m a tremendous believer in the value of plausibly neutral open finance and the security guarantees it entails; but I’m just as much, if not more, a sucker for everyone’s right for opt-in permissionless financial privacy. Weaponizing access to global banking (e.g. state sanctions & ownership limitations) and freezing an individual’s personal bank account (e.g. Canadian truck driver protests) has become all too common. Having an accessible financial alternative is what stands between a democratically self-correcting society and a full-blown totalitarian dystopia.
Counter-intuitively I believe it’s in every state surveillance apparatus’ best interest for a robust, truly and absolutely private financial alternative like Zcash to exist. Analogous to how TOR needs a diverse and large set of users to fulfil its goal of credibly anonymizing internet traffic, widespread Zcash proliferation is in everyone’s net best interest. We just need to communicate how.

I was very happy to see the recent shift from infrastructure-first, to a more holistic approach that includes tangible product deliverables. Most recently, 0ur shift to a new funding model and shielded voting is what tremendously reinvigorated my long-held belief that Zcash will successfully make the jump from surviving to thriving.

After ZSA deployment and full zcashd deprecation I believe outstanding communication, succinct full nodes, robust onboarding mechanisms, and a swift but safe transition to PoS to be our priorities for years to come.

Having closely followed proposals, discussions, conclusions, and implementations of several upgrades across Ethereum & ecosystem, Cosmos, Bitcoin (and of course Zcash), I believe in bringing a holistic community-first perspective to the Zcash mission. One that draws from experience and mistakes made elsewhere and hopefully allows Zcash to live up to the potential that so many community members like myself see.

I’ll gladly participate in a public video call and give some nuance and colour to my convictions.

[Boggerster]

Seeing that the ZF is holding a community call with questions from the community, I thought it might be a good idea for me to expand a little on what I spent some of my energy on over the past years.

I enrolled at the University of St. Gallen in 2017, but dropped out during the first year.

Started a company that was meant to facilitate finance’s transition into embracing web3 into their operations. It was a frustrating but very insightful experience. It taught me about entrenched systems and how difficult it is to introduce arguably much better technology into an existing company stack.

Seeing this, I decided with the help of one of Luxembourg’s most renowned legal firms to open one of, if not the first publicly available investment funds in the region. This was yet another experience that turned out to be just as frustrating as revealing. I talked to countless compliance officers at many banks, an ex-regulator, and even ended up having a lively discussion with the Governor of Luxembourg’s Central Bank at his office. All to no avail, we ended up not further pursuing the endeavour.

I’ve continued managing my own capital until today.

Here are a few things I said in the past and where I stand today:

What will be possible to do with ZSA?

Stablecoins, everything else is noise (without programmability). Here’s a slide by Zama from the Stablecoin Summit in Brussels. Private stablecoins are not only needed for retail, but also, and maybe more impactfully, by industry. Even by only considering legal use-cases, I keep seeing demand estimates for zUSD(T) being massively underestimated. That alone will be an industry-wide killer app, even with the potential caveat of giving viewing key permissions to the respective stablecoin issuer. …

I still believe a ZSA stablecoin is our best shot for critical mass proliferation.

The Last Swing of The Stick

they aren’t, but we can’t have everything. True RWAs with Chainlink proof-of-reserves are still theory on Ethereum; any working solution is using a proxy LLC that pinky-promises the existence the tokenized assets. Add leadership scepticism when it comes to programmability at the L1 and you got 10 to 20 years until there’ll be a truly endogenous RWA/ZEC-backed stablecoin. Without even going into details of how liquidations should work without smart contracts, liquid AMMs, liquidator liveness gu…

I still believe RWA or native ZEC-backed stablecoins are out-of-scope and not practically feasible in the near future.

Decentralizing Zcash issuance

This is a proposal directly related to @zooko’s Zcon4 talk. [link] Tl;dw of his talk current zcash issuance → 80% to miners; 7% to ECC; 13% to the Foundation (8% of the latter go to the Grants Committee). The community is currently discussing between Abolishing this funding mechanism all together Changing it Keeping it as is Option 2 looks to be the most popular path forward. Proposal Implement a curve-like gauge mechanism that decides on the distribution percentages. Make the vote bi-a…

I had my shot at proposing a community-led alternative dev fund mechanism. I am very happy as to where we are heading today.

Do you agree with ECC's decision to not prioritize having a large number of active validators in choice of PoS consensus algorithm?

A deployment option I’ve never heard from the ZEC community is launching on Eigenlayer testnet in the next few months a16z explanation video here Bankless Interview here tl;dr, through Eigenlayer, Ethereum stakers can op-into validating transactions for additional chains, i.e. merge-mining but aligned incentives. An issue I’m seeing is that ZEC privacy makes it horribly difficult to implement with such systems, but maybe my intuition is wrong. And yes there’s this meme that “everybody tal…

I hinted at a potential use case between Eigenlayer staking and ZEC PoS (or finality layer). I am still not sure what that would look like, but it might show my interest in finding synergies among other ecosystems.

I hope this helps spawn a few questions (here).
Looking forward to participating in the ZF community call.

[gigantes]

Honestly I fail to see the utility of centralized stablecoins at this point in time. And there’s the growing possibility (certitude?) that all these centralized issuers of stablecoins will freeze the assets of every outstanding wallets until some sort of KYC/AML is passed.