Hi Josh, hows it going?
Thanks for submitting this Kevin; as with others in the community I’ve followed along Gitcoin’s progress with great interest. Both the ECC and Zcash Foundation contributed directly to Gitcoin for the Blake precompile grant last year, though not in the manner you’re describing here; instead it was a direct grant for specific work.
I remember this. Pretty pumped for this work to be done, looks like is still ongoing. I’m always happy to see opportunities for community interop wherein both ETH and ZEC communities benefit!
We previously had crowdfunding in our platform, but we removed it after lack of interest from the community; I don’t have the exact numbers off hand but it was less than a dozen crowd-funded contributors, with an average of less than 1 ZEC
Thanks for sharing your experience in the past. We actually had a similar experience with crowdfunding when we first launched Gitcoin Grants in Q1 2019, insofar that no one really used it.
The breakthrough for us came when we started computing matching estimates and displaying them prominently in the UI. Something like this is what we’re going for:
The psychology of “contribute $1 and this grant gets $100” is what really changed the game for us, and it’s what took us from 400 contributions in Round 2 to 2000 contributions in Round 3.
I’m not sure if that changes anything for you, but thats at least one data point on who things went for us.
And that’s what the Zcash Foundation generally likes to fund — direct grants for specific work
Got it. Thanks for the feedback. I am more than happy to “respect the no” if thats what is the best path, so please let me know if I’m being beligerant by trying to respectfully work through the objection.
The direct piece of specific work we’re looking to do is to do a small round of QF together over the summer. The goal is to have data-point (albeit a small one) that we can take to MGRC in the fall to make a case for doing something bigger (and thereby more meaningful) together then.
In order to prioritize native $ZEC integration internally vs other priorities, we were hoping to to do the $15k round. I don’t plan to book it as revenue or anything, 100% of the funds will be disbursed to the Zcash community for their “direct grants for specific work”. Though I am not certain that this “passthrough mechanism” is compelling to you, I figured I would explicitly mention it.
Thanks again for the feedback! 
@owocki