Hi All. I am happy and honored to have the ability to run for ZOMG. I am running because I believe Zcash is fundamentally the most important technology of our time and should be distributed to the world in order to preserve freedom and empower individual liberties. ZOMG is the vehicle by which we can fund external projects for the good of the Zcash ecosystem and on-ramp new users.
What I plan to work on for the 20 hours:
-Evaluate and vet grants from a usability and consumer user experience perspective as well as total addressable market - aka asking how much upside does x grant approval have for pushing forward the Zcash ecosystem?
-Create bounties/requests for missing components of the Zcash ecosystem from a consumer perspective
-Create quarterly letter write-ups on approved grants evaluating the projects for future ZOMG members and greater transparency. Thinking of this as somewhat of an audit mechanism as well.
-Define what our KPIs are for ZOMG and communicate that to the community
-Design and/or create tools to support ZOMG as needed
-Communicate with college communities and conduct talks to introduce them to Zcash and encourage them to apply for grants + potentially sponsor hackathons related to Zcash. This will allow Zcash to have the potential to become more global and even viral given the age demographic and existing network effects of college.
Grants and criteria:
-Advance usability and adoption by stakeholders (consumer, developer, business, etc)
-Only projects within Zcash or Zcash ecosystem will receive grants as stated in ZIP 1014 (meaning no Ycash, etc)
-Focus on projects and teams that have the potentiality to create self-sustaining projects without continual grant funding (there are exceptions)
-UDA related projects - this is high leverage as it brings new users into our ecosystem without dilution of ZEC + shows off privacy of ZEC. I’d like to see something like Binance or Harmony Bridge
-Quality example projects and documentation for college and younger developers to take their existing skillset and become Zcash devs in a quicker and efficient manner
-Fund projects that focus on business use cases for Zcash and subsequently fund the creation of business case studies based on these. For example, businesses should not use transparent transactions as they will give up their customer list to competitors, show margins, etc. - can we show a business doing private transactions globally with UDAs and Zcash?
-Break projects into stages like VCs + addressable market + stakeholders and log this data transparently so we as a community can start understanding what is working and what isn’t
Who am I? I’d prefer to stay anonymous for now but would be open to reveal my name and more if elected. I am a long-time ZEC investor and miner of Zcash. I currently work full time as a product designer at a silicon valley startup based in SF. Previously, I was an EIR at a venture capital firm in SF and have launched a number of products including one I founded that was VC-backed. Some of the products I’ve worked on have been featured in the Apple App Store and have worked on a top 100 website globally (Alexa ranking). All of these experiences have honed my skills for understanding what good project planning looks like for software, what are scalable and extensible solutions while developing and providing feedback to software documentation in a helpful manner, etc. I believe these experiences and my design skillset will be accretive and valuable to ZOMG.
On the weekends, I run a small boutique fund focused on natural resources and digital currencies. This takes about 5 hours a month or less given as we are not active traders. The experiences I’ve had evaluating, conducting, researching, understanding, and communicating in private transactions will be invaluable to ZOMG - to both the community and projects that are applying for grants. I also think my understanding of corporate governance and accountability will be helpful for ZOMG.
I will be frank that I have not been active in the forum whatsoever until now. I have been contributing to zcash via mining and have owned it for ~4+ years. I started mining on GPUs and eventually moved over to 3 Antminer Z9 minis, which are ASICs - what I consider the big transition and the good ol days. I sold those z9 minis a few years back and bought 3 Innosilicon A9++ which I’ve run for a bit but have stopped completely for time being. I currently hold about 20-25% of my net worth in Zcash with plans to increase.
As a quick note, I support Zooko and a transition to PoS.
Lastly, thanks for reading and considering me in your vote.