Discussion: pay-to-play Grants for Z-address adoption

Community Grants
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I’m curious to know how the community feels about funding existing entities to add support for Z-addresses. I’m not advocating one way or the other, just writing down some thoughts.

For example: I have heard in the past that large exchanges charged a “fee” just to list a coin to cover their time/effort. What if a major exchange was willing to add Z-addresses for a fee?

Would this be something the MGRC could consider funding to “grow the Zcash ecosystem” or would it be completely out-of-scope because the MGRC has to abide by the same non-profit organization requirements as the Zcash Foundation?

Same question for popular wallets like Jaxx, Trust, Ledger, Trezor, etc… If they said they would only need a one-time fee to add Z-addresses to thier platform would it be something that should be considered for a grant?

What if the MGRC could hire a engineer/team to work with the platform, like the Zcash Foundation has done with Zondax to add Z-addresses on Ledger? I think that is the better way to go. However, what if a platform doesn’t trust/want an outside team working on thier proprietary software?

I have a few schools of thought on this one.

  1. I don’t like the idea of the MGRC paying for a for-profit organization to add Zcash Z-address support, but I understand that they have a finite amount of time/engineering and often won’t accept outside support.

  2. It’s a chicken and egg problem. A for-profit platform like an exchange/wallet adds support for things based on customer demand but we can’t get the customer demand for Z-addresses up because lots of platforms like exchanges/wallets don’t support Z-addresses.

  3. What if pay-to-play is the fastest/only way (in lieu of of overwhelming demand from thier customers for Z-addresses) to get some of the major platforms to make the effort?

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This is a great question! Way to go on bringing this up. I just have one factual point and one brainstorm idea.

Factual point:

Being a public charity in the United States doesn’t preclude activities like this. The requirement is simply that all of the things the organization does, they serve its charitable mission. There’s no prohibition on something like what you describe as long as it serves the mission.

Brainstorm:

What if there were some kind of financial benefit to MGRC, like in return for it funding a company to add Zcash to their product, that company agrees to donate some of its revenue to MGRC to sustain its mission going forward?

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I’ll add a more radical point of view.

The lack of z-address support comes from a self-inflicted wound.

It’s our mess and we need to clean it up, sooner than later.

I wouldn’t want to spend a dime so that exchanges (making millions in revenue) add z-address support. I would rather stop support for t-addresses in the protocol level so that exchanges are forced to do it themselves than losing customers.

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200

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If you want all your clients use next version of software or architecture, you have two options: 1. (not feasible) doing auto-migration where clients don’t need to do anything.
2. Work with few clients willing to do hard work to migrate (this helps identify gaps, build better support to make transition easy), then issue EOS with simple self-served plan to migrate/integrate.

Clients rarely show interest to migrate to new architecture because they have better things to do. Only when their ass is on fire, they dedicate resources to do the work.

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Bump for vis