Frank Braun for ZCG (December 2025)

Governance ZCG Elections
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I’m Frank Braun and I’m nominating myself for ZCG.

For a free society, the ability to communicate and transact privately is essential. Zcash is the best shot we have at achieving financial privacy in our lifetime.

In the role as a ZCG committee member I would like to help make sure new grant applications with a high likelihood of success that help to achieve that mission get funded and the ones that have a low likelihood of success or are just bull market “loot the treasury” projects get rejected — making sure the treasury is also well stocked in the coming bear market. This will help ZCG to function well long-term and continuously support important community projects.

Since I’m pretty new to the Zcash community I don’t know the full historical context, but my understanding is that the current model (ZCG + coinholder-directed retroactive grants) is the result of a long process of trying to find consensus and probably also the result of many things that went wrong.

Grant by committee (ZCG) and coinholder voting both have their own problems, so a hybrid approach does seem to make sense to me.

However, if I could I would like to experiment with new approaches like a futarchy, similar to the one implemented by MetaDAO, because it seems to be pretty promising for delivering better allocation results. But that would require me to first get an “inside view” of ZCG before I can form a good opinion on it. I think I have a good idea of the coinholder-directed voting now after participating in it both as a voter and by running a voting authority.

Areas in which I would especially like to fund projects:

  • coinholder-directed voting / governance improvements
  • organic community/user growth
  • usability, including better software wallets and hardware wallet support
  • transport layer anonymization

I have a Ph.D. in computer science, over 20 years of software development and IT security experience (including management roles). I have been active in crypto since the early Bitcoin days when I became a cypherpunk and got fascinated by the idea of anonymous digital cash. I’m a co-author of the Scrit whitepaper that inspired Fedimint (federated e-cash for Bitcoin). Since I rediscovered Zcash about 5 months ago I became fully Zcash-pilled and have been shilling it on X, my blog, and to everybody who would listen ever since.

My background gives me both the technical skills and the necessary value system for the role, being able to properly assess technical feasibility, grantee skills, and potential impact of grant applications.

Alignment of interest declaration: I hold the majority of my net worth in ZEC. My primary monetary interest in this committee position is the long-term ZEC token price and not the compensation per se. My main motivation is the mission of unstoppable private money.

Thank you for your consideration! If you have any questions about me or my grant evaluation approach, please ask.

Some popular writings of mine on Zcash:

I also recently gave a talk at DARK PRAGUE on Zcash 2.0 — misconceptions about unstoppable private money:

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Really glad to see this! Happy you’re running, Frank!

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Thanks for your support @artkor!

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Hi @frankbraun,

Individuals who purchase ZEC are indirectly investing in zcash teams. One of the core teams building Zcash utility is the Zcash Foundation. ZF has invested a lot of resources in a unique software package name FROST.

How will you as a potential ZCG member expand and grow the utility of FROST for the encrypted Zcash Blockchain?

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Hi @kworks, thank you for the question! I’m not sure I fully understand it, but let me try to answer it as best as I can.

FROST is a foundational technology and I think it’s great that the ZF is funding it. In that sense it’s similar to Arti, the Tor Rust library funded by ZOMG/ZCG — it can be tremendously useful if it exists but it’s unlikely that it’s developed “organically”.

As a ZCG committee member my primary responsibility would be to approve and deny grants. In addition to outreach, evaluation, and coordination with potential grantees.

I would love to see FROST being used, for example, to enable single- and multi-user shielded multisigs in Zcash wallets.

Grant applications to use FROST outside of Zcash would be easy rejects, because it wouldn’t benefit Zcash.

Grant applications to integrate FROST into existing Zcash wallets would be interesting, but due to the fact that it’s a foundational technology it doesn’t seem to be good fit for ZCG. As an example, ECC didn’t apply for a grant to integrate Arti into Zashi and I don’t see them applying for a grant to integrate FROST.

So while I hope that FROST gets some real world use in Zcash soon I don’t really see a way how I could actively grow the utility of FROST in the role of a ZCG committee member.

Or do you have any specific use cases in mind where grantees could be actively chased by committee members that I don’t see?

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It’s good to see your name in this race! I appreciate the level-headed way you’ve been engaging on X. One of my favorite accounts right now. :slight_smile: A mix of technical understanding and clear communication.

ZCG is due for some thoughtful evolution, and having knowledgeable, experienced people who stay grounded and practical is going to matter. This is exciting. Rooting for you! :crossed_fingers:

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Thanks @peacemonger, I appreciate it! You should have mentioned that you basically bugged me into nominating myself :wink:

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:saluting_face: I did. You’re welcome, everyone.

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Love that you brought up Futarchy! I’ve been following MetaDAO as well and as I go through the votes here I keep thinking to myself “this would work much better with Futarchy”

The main reason I have not brought it up yet is I find some of the futarchy mechanisms to be underdeveloped in general, and I don’t think there is a clear way to implement it on Zcash directly without compromising protocol security.

That said, I absolutely think it should be explored as a potential long term solution.

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