Hi @aiyadt. Answers inline.
Yes. I started mining BTC in 2011, and helped launch Bridge21 (cross border remittances using BTC as the payment rail) in 2016. BTC is my second largest crypto position behind ZEC. I’m long BTC because it’s the original, and I believe it will remain a good SoV even as alts like Ethereum and Zcash rise to prominence in areas that BTC isn’t suited for.
Not sure what you mean by account size, but I’m a four time startup founder and served as the CISO for a $2B public company prior to joining ECC.
Ideally as a combination of grants, prizes and investments. Grants for ‘public good projects’, prizes to provide economic benefit for outstanding work done by community members, and investments in projects that are adjacent or built-upon Zcash, but that have a for-profit dynamic.
The same way I’ve helped Techstars vet applicants to its global accelerator/incubator. My primary filter is team. A strong team can deliver considerable value regardless of what tech or market they’re targeting.
Disagree. While the on-chain privacy afforded by Zcash tech may make some metrics difficult or impossible to track, I think that it is possible for applicants to define other metrics that they will use to measure their impact. Anything that isn’t measured, isn’t managed.
I’ve been long Ethereum for a very long time, and have watched with interest as the Defi fever has built over time. I’m primarily interested not in tapping into the Defi hype machine, but instead focusing on Zcash’s potential to be collateral for lower-cost-capital than is presently available to individuals and small businesses in the developing world.
I am also keeping a close eye on the Ren project, which has a mainnet “trustless” two way peg between Zcash and Ethereum that makes it possible to use renZEC in Defi. The Ren project is young and has work to do to improve its security and decentralization, but it’s showing a lot of promise.
At ECC, I’m responsible for Operations, and our team spans several continents and time zones, and our people come from a fairly diverse set of backgrounds. Prior to ECC I was CISO at SendGrid, and was one of the primary sponsors of our Diversity and Inclusion initiative, which helped to strengthen our team by focusing on increasing the diversity of candidates at the “top of the recruiting funnel”, as well as making employees from underrepresented backgrounds feel comfortable doing their best work.
See answer above. Techstars is a global accelerator, and has successfully transitioned to a ‘full remote’ program since Covid lockdowns began.
I am not sure I understand your question, but I do believe that since MGRC will be entirely focused on expanding the Zcash ecosystem, I believe that it will represent a big step function up, over and above the ZF’s prior grants program.
See this post where I unpack some of my thoughts on the ‘investment’ angle of MGRC. Investments in other projects could provide some diversification for the MGRC funds, and provide a mechanism to help the MGRC weather volatility.
Longer term, I’m interested in seeing Major Grants become a legal entity that is autonomous, and no longer part of the ZF. Once that happens, MG could actively work to diversify the treasury in such a way to better manage volatility.