Giveth and Zcash (grant proposal)

[Yass]

About Giveth

Giveth is a donation platform built on Ethereum, rewarding and empowering those who give to projects, to society, and to the world. We are building a business model that provides value in the nonprofit sector and public goods. We were founded in 2016 and have a core team consisting of ~20 with 50+ regular Giveth contributors, including many well-known names in the space.

Our organization has incredible access to experts in the space. There are very few DAO experts with higher regard than our founder Griff Green, and because of our long history and connections to rescuing TheDAO, Parity Multisig, and various other at-risk funds in Ethereum, we have a wide network of smart contract experts and general web3 experts across all disciplines.

Below is a quick run-through of the major pieces of our ecosystem:

GIV - A transferable ERC-20 token that lies at the heart of the future of giving (native to Mainnet).

GIVbacks - The entry point to the GIVeconomy. Donors to verified public goods projects get GIV tokens in return. This flips the script on tax deductible donation, creating a decentralized and borderless way of incentivizing donations. Learn more about GIVbacks.

GIVpower - Donors can lock their GIV tokens for GIVpower and use them to boost/curate projects on the platform. Projects with more GIVpower are ranked higher and in turn, their donors are rewarded with more GIVbacks.

Partnership Proposal

We would like to add our donation application Giveth to Zcash so that every project on Giveth can raise funds with Zcash and bring the major GIVeconomy features (GIVbacks, GIVpower staking and governance) to the Zcash community.

That would mean each project will have a transparent Zcash address to receive donations to.

In order for the user to receive GIVbacks for their donation, the user must also have an Ethereum wallet (e.g. Metamask) since GIVbacks are paid to the donor’s Ethereum address.

How the scenario looks for the user:

1. ZEC holder chooses to donate with Zcash

2. They have the option of receiving GIVbacks or not

3. If they opt for GIVbacks, they must sign in with Ethereum

4. A QR code pops up alongside the text of the ZEC wallet address of the nonprofit

5. The ZEC holder sends funds to that address

6. We watch the wallet address for a set amount of time to calculate the GIVbacks for the ZEC holder

Note 1: Only donations associated with a user with Ethereum wallet address will be listed on our donation page

Note 2: If the user prefers to donate without connecting their Ethereum wallet, they will receive a ZEC address to send their donation to (we don’t track this kind of donation in our backend and won’t list them in the frontend).

Areas of Focus

1. Onboarding projects and donors to Zcash for the long term

Giveth can bring hundreds of already verified public goods projects to the Zcash network.
We can enable projects on Giveth to raise funds on Zcash, and any donations to verified projects on Zcash would receive up to 80% of their donation back in GIV streamed over time through our GIVbacks program.

We would also like to incentivize verified projects to onboard Zcash by giving the first 500 verified projects that onboard 1 ZEC. This would take 500 ZEC, where 100% would be given to reputable projects making the world a better place.

Giveth enables anyone working to produce public goods to raise funds with crypto, hopefully soon that will also be with funds on Zcash!

These public goods tools are just the beginning. Giveth hopes to help projects evolve past donations and sacrifice. Public goods are not just a feel-good, heartwarming act of kindness; they are a [$35 trillion USD global industry, and in our estimation, the most overlooked web3 opportunity. We have the chance to favorably disrupt this sector with web3 tooling, and Giveth is positioned to lead the way. Check out this awesome video from Devcon where Griff describes this opportunity at length.

2. Marketing and building awareness

We have a talented comms team who is managing and coordinating initiatives ranging from Twitter with +11k followers, blogs, podcasts and other channels. With this joint partnership we would engage in the following types of marketing:

• Digital & social media partner promotion (Twitter and wherever else applicable)
• Newsletter and/or email campaign announcing Zcash as a partner
• Engagement (Retweets, likes and quotes) to Giveth’s posts announcing Zcash partnership
• Announcement on Giveth and Zcash Discord (community Discord channel)
• Announcement on Zcash Telegram channel (if applicable)
• Partner listing, Zcash presence on Giveth website and vice versa
• Events organization (do a partnership) - Giveth is an active participant in multiple web3 events across the world, and we’d be eager to plan or organize joint events with our partners to raise awareness in donating to public goods and impact projects in the space

Funding milestones

We’d like to ask for $35K USD for the development work for this project plus 500 ZEC to incentivize projects to onboard on Zcash.

Transparency and measurement

We will measure the success of this project by the number of projects onboarded on Zcash and by the creation of a new use case for ZEC, donations, which will be measured and presented during our weekly DAO calls as well as on our dashboards.

So far we have more than 1,800 projects registered on Giveth, over 14,500 donations with + 4,200 unique donors who are actively contributing on our platform.

[aquietinvestor]

Hi @Yass - Welcome to the forum, and thank you for submitting your grant proposal! We will review it in the upcoming weeks and reach out if we have any questions.

In the meantime, if you have any questions for us, you can post them to this thread or DM us at @ZcashGrants.

Zcash Community - We want to hear your feedback on this grant! You can post your comments to this thread or DM us at @ZcashGrants if you’d like to provide feedback in private.

Thanks!

[JoakimEQ]

First of all, really love GivETH and the mission you folks are on. Superb stuff!

Second of all, I think private donations is an amazing idea and WELL needed. There have been several queries about this in every single on-chain donations-related discussion, and it was one of the most often cited neutral usages of past privacy protocols like tornado cash.

So so far I agree. Giveth is a great neutral builder of public goods, and private donations are needed. However, I would have a few questions/topics for discussion:

1. Would love some future ideation from your part on if this was possible to run fully on Zcash, without needing the link to ethereum. This seems like a pretty integral part of the puzzle if you want to continue receiving ZEC funding from Zcash entities.

2. I would love to see is a clear committal to not only node maintenance, but to maintain that this way of private donations is maintained to work for the next x years. Too many of the funded integrations cease to work in a very quick timeline.

3. I see that your current UX is mostly focused only on ZEC holders. Could you also go a step further and figure out a possible flow for Ethereum users that want to use this feature to pay privately? I would bet this is something you could include as an additional milestone and get more funding for - it can be thought of as a way of introducing ZEC to new users . Even a basic flow suggestion a CEX and wallet to use could get you quite far.

Just my 3 cents!

[vito]

Giveth is a lovely project with lovely people!

This will be interesting

[sktbrd]

I am a fellow supporter of zcash community and a active donator and project manager on giveth. I would love to see this happening.

[GriffGreen]

Thanks for the great review @JoakimEQ !!

@JoakimEQ

Would love some future ideation from your part on if this was possible to run fully on Zcash, without needing the link to ethereum. This seems like a pretty integral part of the puzzle if you want to continue receiving ZEC funding from Zcash entities.

ZEC donors (private & transparent) can use Giveth without any link to ethereum. There is an optional piece that requires Ethereum, and that is GIVbacks, where we reward donors with GIV tokens… We PAY donors to donate!!

We have it scoped so GIVbacks can be rewarded to private and transparent ZEC donations, but ethereum is really not very friendly to anonymity, so it is totally optional. If the donor does want these tokens, then they need to tell us an ETH address to send them to (they would get the tokens on Gnosis Chain. But, if they don’t want the tokens, they won’t need to interact with any other chain besides Zcash. They will simply browse the website, click the donate button, select Zcash and boom its done.

@JoakimEQ

I would love to see is a clear committal to not only node maintenance, but to maintain that this way of private donations is maintained to work for the next x years. Too many of the funded integrations cease to work in a very quick timeline.

We can do that. We absolutely plan to maintain this feature for the lifetime of the product itself, once it is built the only challenge will be maintaining the node, which is why it is added to the proposal. The only conceivable reason it would stop is if there is some crazy pivot away from our current application (which we do not expect). What we can commit to is supporting ZEC donations for the next 3 years, most likely in the current app and most likely for MUCH longer than 3 years but if there is a pivot away from the current application for the next 3 years, we can commit to including ZEC donations as a feature in the new application.

@JoakimEQ

I see that your current UX is mostly focused only on ZEC holders. Could you also go a step further and figure out a possible flow for Ethereum users that want to use this feature to pay privately? I would bet this is something you could include as an additional milestone and get more funding for - it can be thought of as a way of introducing ZEC to new users . Even a basic flow suggestion a CEX and wallet to use could get you quite far.

This is a great idea… I will work with the team to design a flow. I really like this meme of “use Zcash for truly anon donations” and absolutely we will build a communications strategy around it promoting it’s use to the lunar punks out there

[WhyldWanderer]

As an avid Giveth user and contributor, this proposal is exciting!

I think this initiative would bring a wave of new users to the Zcash network.
I currently don’t use Zcash, however if it was integrated into Giveth, it would give me the perfect use case and entry point to get more involved with the Zcash community.

I also think that incentivizing onboarding with ZEC is a wonderful idea and I would love to be able to offer this to projects as I am helping them onboard to Giveth.

All-in-all, this seems like a win-win for everyone involved and, in my opinion, these types of collaborations are what makes Web3 revolutionary. I look forward to following up on this later.

[Cotabe]

GM!!!

I’m would also love to see this integration happening. The Giveth UX currently has the option of anonymous donations, but this only means that it’s not reflected in the UX & did already get the feedback that it would be great to have truly anonymous donations.

On the other hand, I would love to see for-good projects and donors from all over the world get onboarded to the Zcash ecosystem & discover new opportunities.

[GriffGreen]

Ok! So talked with the designers and comms crew and we can absolutely make a promotion to the Ethereum Community that Zcash is THE BEST choice for truly anon donations.

The plan would be to make a link underneath the “Anonomous Donation” check box that says something like: “Want to make it truly anonymous? Use Zcash”

Use Zcash would be a hyperlink, and when they click it, they would get a modal that would pop up and tell them how to exchange into ZEC and send it privately.

Here is what the donation page would look like, with a zoom in on the Zcash marketing addition:

These are of course not at all final designs… and the modal that we would build to pop up and educate the donor about how to use Zcash will require some research to suggest the best solutions for swapping and hosting a wallet. We would love a little bit of help to suggest and review our final submissions on that from you guys, I’m sure you know the best wallets and exchanges better than anyone.

This integration would also come along with a massive marketing campaign that we would do to the ethereum community to encourage them to try out zcash… and honestly, with tornado cash being sanctioned, and then Aztec pausing their service, there is a huge opportunity for Zcash with this market.

We would ask for $9000 of ZEC on top of the current proposal to add this work, this would cover the comms cost (which was included in the initial proposal for free) and a little bit extra for the extra design and research for the extra feature.

This is an optional add on… we are happy to stick with the original proposal or include this extra feature.

WDYT @JoakimEQ :-D?

[Yass]

Hey everyone in the Zcash community!

I wanted to take a moment to express my deep gratitude for the open and transparent discussions that take place during your community calls and forum. It’s refreshing to see such an inclusive approach to evaluating proposals. I’d like to address a couple of concerns raised about Giveth in this thread, hoping to contribute to your future discussions regarding our grant proposal.

1. GIV Token and skepticism about its success:
   Giveth has been adding value to Ethereum for over 6 years, and we launched a token about 1.5 years ago at the end of the bull market. Despite having a token, we do not have, and never have had, any investors and have never sold tokens, nor has our token been particularly successful.

We issue GIV tokens via our GIVbacks program to reward Donors to verified public goods for donating. It is essentially donation mining: just as Ethereum rewards stakers for securing the network, Giveth rewards donors for supporting public goods. This flips the script on tax deductible donation, creating a decentralized and borderless way of incentivizing donations.

While we have this cool token, it has never been an investment vehicle nor has it been lucrative to our DAO. We are funded solely by donations and grants.

2. How we stand out from Gitcoin:
   We are the best donation platform web3 can offer, unlike most donation platforms in web3:
   We are always on 24/7
   We verify the projects manually to ensure our verified projects are legitimate and providing public goods
   We subsidize every donation to verified projects with $GIV

Throughout our journey, we have not only focused on our core project at Giveth to promote public goods and create real-world impact, but we have also played a vital role in supporting various projects in the web3 space.
Here’s a full description of our historical highlights, success stories and 2023 updates of various Giveth projects:

Giveth Success Stories & 2023 Updates

At Giveth, we have an awesome team of developers and token engineers who can’t wait to integrate the cool features of Zcash into our platform. We’re excited to provide users who value their anonymity with a unique and enhanced experience. We’re open to your ideas and feedback, ready to make this proposal even better.

Thanks a million for considering our grant proposal and for the chance to collaborate with the vibrant Zcash community. We’re stoked about the potential synergies and can’t wait to work together towards our shared goals.

[GGuy]

@ZcashGrants before today I hadn’t heard of Giveth. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall during that call to hear more about this project .

I’m writing this comment to reflect on the low volume of community feedback. I personally believe the low community engagement on this is partly due to the uncertainty of the effectiveness of grants like this. In the short term I imagine the effectiveness of this grant might be low. So I believe this comes down to the team and the discussions you had about the possible effectiveness of this project in the long term. But if you need some more community feedback of which side of the fence I’d fall off… then I’d currently fall off on the “yes” side.

---

Off-topic: I only started watching devcon video after writing the majority of this post. So far I agree with Griff so far. I believe public goods funding IS going to change unimaginably in the future. It’s probably one of the things future generations are going to look back and say “say what? You use to do public goods funding how? ”. In my mind it’s possibly one of those changes that’s so drastic and impactful that a time period in the history of civilisation could be named after it .

[Yass]

@GGuy thank you so much for taking time to read our grant, share your thoughts and watch the Devcon video!
Giveth has been heavily involved in helping so many projects throughout its lifetime to give them a voice and help them become standalone projects in the ecosystem:

• Provided technical support for TheDAO recovery for years & rescued $210M worth of Crypto in the 1st Parity Multisig hack
• Created the MiniMe token, the predecessor to the token contract currently used by ENS & many others.
• We helped spark the scaling movement by hosting the first Ethereum scaling conference: ScalingNow! in 2018 (free to attend). From that we helped launch xDai & our founder Jordi Baylina, went head first into it launching Hermez & Polygon’s zkEVM.
• Countless public goods focused projects have spunout of the Giveth: DAppNode, BrightID, Token Engineering Commons, & Commons Stack just to name a few.

Recently we have had the opportunity and honor to participate in several grant rounds to bring more ammunition into our team and turbo boost the projects on our roadmap to bring more impact in the public goods. In this post we’re outlining some of the upcoming projects for this year and future, much of which we have already accomplished: 2023 Giveth Looking Forward. 🕵️‍♂️ Watch out, 2023, Giveth is… | by Dr Suga | Giveth**

Here’s a full description of our historical highlights, success stories and 2023 updates of various Giveth projects:

Giveth Success Stories & 2023 Updates

When it comes to the effectiveness of our project, both in the short-term and the long-term (and let me tell you, we’re all about the long-term game), we’re confident about our success and truly passionate about Giveth’s mission and the positive impact we can make in the public goods space. By forging strong partnerships like the one we could have with Zcash, we’re confident that we can achieve our goals together. It would be fantastic to join your community call for a brief Q&A session to address any concerns from the community about this!

[SnakeGH]

Well done @Yass as the proposal is amazing and well done all from the Zcash community for engaging and firing back very well thought out questions, comments and ideas.

I would love for nothing more than to see Giveth’s platform added to Zcash. I’ve recently been getting to know Zooko more and more and it just makes sense that these two incredible communities would combine in a working partnership.

[decentralistdan]

@Yass, thank you for your grant submission, the @ZcashGrants Committee has voted to reject this proposal at the most recent meeting. But would like to recommend that you keep an eye out for the announcement regarding the next cohort of the Zcash Foundation Minor Grants Program.