@earthrise for the ZF board

Governance
3

Thanks, I accept the nomination!

In case this is the first time you’re hearing about me, a bit of background: I first got involved with Zcash while working at ECC for a year pre-launch. I returned to ECC as a security engineer in late 2018, and then in 2023 I started the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead grant, where I audited most of Zcash’s community projects; that work is now being continued by Least Authority.

I believe I can contribute to Zcash by serving on the ZF board. In particular, I plan to focus on these key points:

  1. I will strive to ensure that large, expensive engineering efforts are concretely tied to improving Zcash as a product and gaining more adoption. For example, protocol changes should be informed by adoption-blockers and scoped to include all of the “last mile” efforts needed to make the new features accessible to users and developers.
  2. Public spats between Zcash community leaders have done damage to the community’s unity and optimism. A focus of mine within the ZF board will be on improving relations between Zcash community leaders, emphasizing constructive disagreement and solution-finding over winning arguments in the public’s eye. I think I’m in a good position to help with this because I personally trust everyone to be working in the best interest of Zcash.
  3. Everyone working on Zcash is part of a movement to protect privacy rights; it’s more than a job. I will support a culture that finds the best path forward for Zcash through open discussion and blameless postmortems, encouraging ideation from everyone involved in the project, no matter their role.

You can get a sense for my views and the kinds of things I will advocate for from my posting history on these forums, e.g. user adoption (focusing protocol development on UX challenges), community priorities (community projects supporting each other while remaining decentralized), funding (shifting the focus from “who gets money” to planning and accountability), economics, etc. Note that I’ve likely changed my mind on a lot of things!

Thank you for considering me for the position!

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