Thanks, rigZ. I appreciate the thoughtful feedback and your offers to help with NEAR revenue sharing and alternative providers. Your experience with Onramper is relevant to the risks we need to address.
One dimension I would give more weight to is individual empowerment and financial sovereignty. For someone earning and spending in local currency, Zcash becomes useful when they can acquire it, hold it in their own wallet, and convert it back when needed. Accessibility, privacy and user choice deserve consideration alongside volume and commercial sustainability.
That motivation comes from our own experience within the Zcash community. We built 0xramp to address a practical problem we encountered ourselves: connecting local payment methods with Zcash through a usable flow.
On the “frontend / UX glue” characterization, I think that understates the contribution of making separate financial systems work together. Existing protocols provide important components, but someone still has to connect them, handle incomplete transactions, reconcile amounts, manage recovery and give users accurate information about their money.
Our contribution has been to connect P2P.me’s fiat settlement with NEAR Intents’ conversion capabilities into a working local-currency ↔ ZEC experience. This specific connection was the gap we set out to solve. Building that experience creates additional utility from infrastructure that previously addressed separate parts of the problem. Our integration announcement.
There are useful examples of this approach within the Zcash ecosystem. ZODL raised more than $25 million in seed funding for its broader wallet and protocol work, while its wallet integrates NEAR Intents for both swaps and CrossPay. The execution infrastructure comes from NEAR, and ZODL contributes the wallet integration and user experience that make it useful. Both contributions have value. Funding announcement, Swaps documentation, CrossPay documentation.
Similarly, red·bridge has an approved $477,658 launch grant for connecting Zcash with Avalanche and the wider ecosystem, alongside operational and maintenance work. Its architecture also involves other networks and dependencies. These are different projects with different funding models and scopes, so their amounts are not direct budget benchmarks. They illustrate that interoperability can justify substantial engineering and operational investment. Approved application.
We also have an existing distribution opportunity. P2P.me whitelisted 0xramp, allowing approximately 30,000 existing protocol accounts to access the integration with their established reputation and limits. Those are eligible accounts, and converting that opportunity into active Zcash usage is work we need to measure. Whitelisting announcement.
The partner infrastructure has meaningful backing: P2P.me raised $2 million in seed funding, followed by the $6 million raise listed by MetaDAO. P2P.me and its leadership have also publicly expressed support for this direction, including the message, “Your private money deserves private ramps.” That alignment matters when building access to Zcash, while funding and endorsements leave the underlying risks to be assessed on their own merits. Coinbase Ventures, MetaDAO, P2P.me’s post, Sheldon’s post.
On volume, we have processed approximately $20,000 in a little over one month. That is our current observed baseline. We should distinguish overall platform volume from ZEC-specific activity, and the available history does not yet support a dependable twelve-month forecast. A credible projection needs explicit assumptions about account activation, repeat usage and transaction sizes, followed by regular comparison with actual results.
We agree that sustainability matters. We are open to a transparent take rate and revenue-sharing arrangements with the protocols receiving the flow. Your help with NEAR would be welcome. At this early volume, we still need to demonstrate that the economics can support reliable operations while keeping the service affordable.
On the $206k budget, the request covers twelve months. The $130k compensation supports two part-time founders and two part-time contractors. The $65.5k services category includes independent security review, legal work, community integrations and reserves; $10.5k covers infrastructure. The scope includes corridor hardening, privacy improvements, wallet integration and public reporting. We welcome scrutiny of individual costs against those deliverables. Application and budget.
On dependencies, we are already evaluating additional aggregators behind the interface. The cbZEC integration has also given us practical experience operating USDC/Base ↔ cbZEC/Base swaps, expanding our ability to assess liquidity and execution options beyond NEAR Intents. Those alternatives need validation of liquidity, costs, settlement and failure recovery before becoming dependable fallbacks.
That strengthens the swap side. Diversifying fiat settlement is a separate task, and your introductions could help us advance both.
Your concern about bank freezes is valid. Non-custody does not prevent a bank from freezing an account. Different providers and architectures expose users to different risks, which need to be evaluated by likelihood, impact and available protections. Licensed providers can expand users’ choices, and we would assess them alongside coverage, cost, privacy and user control.
We also need to remain precise about privacy: 0xramp currently delivers to transparent Zcash addresses; improving shielded delivery is part of the proposed work. Current capabilities and roadmap.
We welcome collaboration on stronger alternatives and sustainable economics. What we ask is that the evaluation also recognize the working connection we have built, the existing distribution opportunity, and the value of giving individuals practical access to Zcash. That contribution should be judged through reliable execution, measurable adoption and the financial choices it makes available to users.
