ZCG is only allowed to review and approve grants that exist.
Again this is not a grants prioritization problem
Im comfortable in providing some numbers that are publicly available to help this conversation along. This dashboard of metrics from the grants committee websitewill help in seeing where grants are in the process and the funding across many projects.
The zf does an amazing job of tracking, monitoring, and keeping everyone informed of the progress and status of active and open grants. In this forum minutes of the meetings are posted for community review and feedback.The ZF is responsible for administration of approved grants and they hold the relationship with the grantees. ZCG is not an independent 3rd party, it is a community elected administrative review board and it is defined in the scope of ZIP-1014 as it is written today.
I can speak only for myself and hopefully this will help inform those looking to join ZCG in the future. Each grant and week is different so ymmv.
Be prepared to actively contribute at a minimum 15 hrs a month to be an effective member.
Of those:
7 hrs per month is administrative tasks and meetings.
- 1.25 per week (5 hrs per month) on internal comms, ambassador comms, reading community feedback, rfps
- 2 one hour zf /zcg official meetings per month for grants approval and comments
8 hrs is spent on application review
~2 hrs each depending on:
- size of grant,
- how easy information is to find,
- if their github is easy to review,
- meeting with the team
This work cannot be farmed out and is why the zcg is elected.
This equates to roughly 4 grants per month or 48 grants per year.
Top down math: From the spreadsheet 122 total grants have been reviewed in ~2.5 years. This is ~48 per year.
The 40% of the dev fund desiginated for “Major Grants” is for large-scale long-term projects. This money is administered by the Zcash Foundation. There is no need to hire staff.
As of Aug 27, 2022, Zcash Community Grants has: 137,749.99 ZEC which equates to$8.5M USD at $61.61 ZECUSD
48 grants a year with an annual budget of 10 mil is still only ~200k on average per project in a bear market.
The pipeline is open for grants to be submitted. In the last zf / zcg meeting I asked for some metrics around how long each step of the process takes so we can provide transparency to recipients.
The help needed from the community is in finding teams with big ideas and little money and getting them on the path to funding.