Grant Application – A Plural Case for Privacy: Zcash and Islamic Digital Finance

Community Grants
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Hello Zcash community,

I have submitted a Zcash Community Grants application for a research and education project titled A Plural Case for Privacy: Zcash and Islamic Digital Finance. The ambition of this project is to provide a framework that will help extend Zcash beyond a Western theory of privacy.

GitHub application:

The Central Claim

Zcash’s technical architecture is more globally adaptable than the predominantly Western ideological framework currently used to explain it.

Or, what knowledge base would Zcash need if it were to operate outside the context of U.S. libertarian regulation?

Project Summary

Zcash has developed one of the strongest technical architectures for financial privacy, solving a technical problem that most public blockchains leave unresolved: transactions can be verified without making a person’s financial life visible to everyone. Yet the normative framework commonly used to justify this achievement remains much narrower than the technology itself. The intellectual vocabulary commonly used to explain that architecture is rooted chiefly in Western liberal and cypherpunk traditions. Here, privacy is often justified through the approach of Adam Smith and the Austrian school of economics: individual autonomy, freedom from surveillance, and resistance to centralized power.

But people outside of the Western liberal tradition often think differently: for example, an elevator on Shabbat day in Israel stopping at every floor to avoid people pressing the button. Though at first glance the rationale behind their actions can be perplexing, that is the way they prefer.

This creates a strategic problem for Zcash. If adopting privacy technology appears to require adopting a specifically Western privacy ideology, many potential users and institutions may view Zcash as incompatible with their existing moral worlds—even when Zcash’s actual technology could serve their needs.

Using HAQQ Network as a bounded case, the project will develop the first sustained account of how Zcash privacy can be compared with non-Western blockchain projects. The goal is not merely to translate existing Zcash messaging for Muslim audiences. It is to allow a non-Western ethical tradition to interpret how Zcash’s technical features can be adopted.

Why HAQQ?

Islamic ethical reasoning protects property and entrusted information from unauthorized exposure. It condemns intrusive surveillance, yet it does not treat privacy as freedom from every form of authority. Disclosure may be justified, but only when the recipient has a legitimate claim and the information disclosed is limited to a legitimate purpose.

This is not a weaker approximation of Western privacy maximalism but a different theory of financial visibility.

Meanwhile, HAQQ offers moral assurance that makes Muslims feel good conscience, which is rooted in the history of Islam. Muslims users prefer recognizable religious authority and enforceable Shariah rules, even when that requires giving up a degree of transactional privacy.

HAQQ shares some meaningful common ground with Zcash. Shielded transactions prevent universal exposure, while user-controlled disclosure allows information to be shared selectively when a justified need arises. I describe this possibility as governed disclosure: accountability without making financial life visible to everyone.

HAQQ is therefore not presented merely as a potential market for ZEC. It is an analytical site from which the existing conceptual boundaries of privacy technology can be reconsidered. The question may be which kinds of privacy can coexist with visible compliance, rather than whether the non-Western blockchain projects should maximize privacy.

The comparison asks a broader adoption question:

Can Zcash become meaningful to communities that value privacy but do not understand privacy primarily through Western liberal individualism or resistance to all authority?

What the project will produce

The requested grant is $12,000. The proposed outputs include:

  • An open-access comparative research report
  • A 3,000-word Zcash education brief
  • A one-page legitimacy framework
  • A public online presentation and feedback session for the Zcash community.
  • Documentation of at least one conference or blockchain-summit presentation or organized promotion activity, including the venue, audience, and how the activity promoted or improved the Zcash-facing work.

The project will not claim that Zcash is automatically Shariah-compliant or that an Islamic-finance audience already constitutes proven demand for ZEC. The purpose is to observe and identify credible opportunities, then clarify the barriers before making adoption claims.

I would especially welcome community feedback on the following questions:

  1. Which Zcash materials best explain privacy by default together with selective or user-controlled disclosure?
  2. Has the community previously developed privacy arguments outside the language of Western individual autonomy?
  3. Which Zcash educators, wallet teams, or ecosystem projects might find an Islamic-finance adoption brief useful?

7.23 update

To clarify the project’s methodological basis, the study does not treat stakeholder perceptions as self-validating evidence. It will compare public protocol materials with semi-structured interviews and community discourse, then identify where participants’ accounts converge or conflict. The project’s contribution lies not in explaining Zcash cryptography, but in examining how privacy technologies acquire—or fail to acquire—legitimacy within Islamic-finance communities. My training in religious studies, financial systems, and software enables that specific analysis.

Why Zcash?

I am not studying Sharia smart-contract approval in general, rather, I study whether accountability must require public visibility. On HAQQ and most EVM chains, transactions are publicly visible and oversight is added on top. Zcash starts from a different architecture: shielded transaction data remains private, while viewing keys allow the user to disclose it to a chosen auditor without exposing it to everyone or giving up control of the funds.

That creates an institutional option HAQQ does not currently offer: accountable disclosure without public surveillance. The proposal asks whether Islamic-finance actors see value in that option, what would prevent them from using it, and how Zcash can reach the Muslims audience. Those are findings the research is meant to produce, not claims I can prove before delving into it.

7.26 update

This project examines which kind of institutions users regard as legitimately entitled to receive that information due to cultural context, and what factors non-Western users count in to choose a blockchain amid Western projects. A privacy-boundary map can show where information becomes visible. It cannot explain when visibility becomes accountability rather than surveillance. While Zcash governs access to information, this project studies the institutions that govern the legitimacy of access.

This matters before developers can responsibly design disclosure workflows for communities whose trusted authorities are not limited to state regulators or commercial compliance providers.

Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 8/3/2026
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Hi,

I live in an Islamic country, I know Islam well and I know privacy as well. But I personally don’t understand your concern. I read through your whole text, yet still, don’t get what you mean by “western privacy.”

If it’s not too much to ask, would you please bring a couple of examples?

Thanks :folded_hands:t2:

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feel like this addresses a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Can you quantify an addressable market for this? are there benchmarks from similar projects?

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Thank you for the question. It’s good to see participants from Islamic countries. And I can see that my phrase “Western privacy” was too broad.

I am not implying that people in Western and Islamic countries experience two starkly different kinds of privacy, nor suggesting that Islam is unfamiliar with privacy. I was referring more specifically to a prominent justificatory framework within cryptocurrency and privacy advocacy, rather than to “Westerners” as a population.

Let me give two examples.

First, cryptocurrency privacy is often justified through the sovereign individual’s protection from states, corporations, or other centralized institutions. Under this framing, financial privacy protects personal autonomy by preventing an outside authority from observing transactions or determining which activities are legitimate. The familiar cypherpunk concern with surveillance is one example. “Resistance to all authority” was too strong a phrase; “skepticism toward centralized or coercive authority” would be more accurate.

Second, privacy technologies are often presented through the ideal of trust minimization, or displacing trust in traditional institutions with trust in code. Instead of relying on an institution to use financial information responsibly, cryptography should make unnecessary disclosure technically impossible. Authority is treated primarily as a potential threat from which the user needs protection.

However, throughout Islamic scholarship from the classical age support privacy for partly different reasons. In fact, it is quite important to maintain a Muslim community globally and locally. We know its significance not only from the interpretation of theologians but also from philosophers like Ibn Sina and Ibn Khaldun. That is to say, the concept of privacy is derived from an individual’s independence from society or authority in classical Islamic tradition.

Delving into the idea of privacy, the prohibition against tajassus—searching into another person’s concealed affairs—is one example. The concept of amanah can also make entrusted information morally protected. That is to say, privacy in Islam depends on individuals’ duties to know or disclose about another. This collectivist tendency rooted in history makes the context for privacy different.

This distinction is why I am studying HAQQ. HAQQ itself is not a privacy network, and I am not assuming that its users are demanding Zcash-style privacy. It is valuable as a case because blockchain finance there is legitimated through religious authority and institutional accountability, rather than through the removal of trusted authority.

The comparison asks whether Zcash’s technical architecture—especially the separation of verification from universal public visibility—could support this different way of organizing financial visibility. Privacy would protect information from the general public and unauthorized observers without necessarily denying limited disclosure to a legitimately entitled party.

So my argument is not that “Islamic privacy” opposes “Western privacy.” It is that the normative case for financial privacy may be broader than the liberal and cypherpunk vocabulary most visible in cryptocurrency discussions. HAQQ gives me a concrete case through which to examine that possibility.

I appreciate the question, and wished I made this distinction much clearer in the proposal.

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Thank you. Here I want to distinguish market size from the institutional process the project studies.

The aim of this research is twofold: the infrastructure must be compatible with the political and regulatory environment in which it operates. It must also become legitimate within the moral world of its intended users. Technical capacity alone satisfies neither requirement. And HAQQ demonstrates how non-Western actors are creating locally legitimate pathways toward financial autonomy.

Also, the proposal should not assume an addressable-market estimate in advance. Surely, the evidence that Muslim users are rejecting Zcash because its public language is “too Western” is almost impossible to find. But let me give you an example: what you decide to eat tonight is highly personalized and contextualized; it depends on your upbringing and living environment. It is not quantifiable, but it is happening. As for a blockchain. What they decide to take is not merely quantifiable and purely efficiency-based, but a blending of a lot of factors, including ethics and sovereignty concerns. The conditions shaping adoption are empirically observable, but they are not equivalent to a pre-existing, quantifiable market.

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@cavalla “Surely, the evidence that Muslim users are rejecting Zcash because its public language is “too Western” is almost impossible to find.” Then I don’t think community money should be directed to projects with no actual impact?

Secondly, I have a major concern. You are a PhD in religious studies. Are you sure you have the requisite experience to know about Zcash’s inner workings, or are you going to be looking at it from an external perspective, using Google to look everything up? In which case, your research is just as, if not infinitely more useful to the university you work at, as a neutral comparison between digital money systems, and asking one of the systems to FUND YOU is just (a) asking for bias and does NOT look good, and (b) illogical.

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I don’t usually answer questions with strong prejudices. Although I appreciated your apparently taking a close look at my resume, I still felt no need to explain my credentials to you. However, I have a great deal of respect for the Zcash community, so I will give a quick heads-up here.

First, this research is a pioneer. The study aims to answer the question of how Zcash can achieve adoption in a new ethical and institutional environment. All Islamic policymakers I encountered also agreed with me that they want a Shariah-compatible solution, but it is rare to find in most blockchain projects now. So they lack good Web3 projects they can introduce to their community. The fact that you are stuck with a prejudice of “Muslims will just adopt what we have cause otherwise they are not our users so why bother” shows precisely the significance of studies like this. Developers will miss a lot when conducting projects in the first place if we do not understand what the Islamic actors have in mind.

Second, please do not mix up “studying the social applications of Zcash” with “explaining the underlying cryptography of Zcash.” I have some software background and surely am no expert on cryptography. And the aim of this study is not to build an implementation. My expertise in coding, finance, and religious studies enables me to look at things from a very unique perspective. And the three combined are enough for research like this.

Third, Zcash would like Zcash-specific knowledge that it presently does not possess. Both academia and Zcash foster public goods; that is, knowledge in this case. Praise is not the only aim; in fact, I don’t think praise is by any means the aim for a Zcash grant. We all want to publicize the public goods we made. All the funded publicizing projects are just saying what happened in Zcash and what Zcash did recently. They are not money-bought praise but fact-providing. And in my case, the knowledge from this research will be about Zcash and Zcash will benefit from it.

This qualitative research has received very positive feedback from people serving on the national cybersecurity projects as well as policymakers across different regions. Wish you take some time to sit down and read my response.

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“I still felt no need to explain my credentials to you.” You are here for community review, asking for a grant for abstract research, the kind that DEPENDS on your credentials.

“This qualitative research has received very positive feedback from people serving on the national cybersecurity projects as well as policymakers across different regions.” I myself regularly read research in this field, and if I ever saw that the research comparing system A with system B for purpose P was funded by system A, I would never trust that research like, ever, since it’s a subjective assessment, not a neutral facts-based judgement like in cryptography, is it?

“Second, please do not mix up “studying the social applications of Zcash” with “explaining the underlying cryptography of Zcash.” I have some software background and surely am no expert on cryptography. And the aim of this study is not to build an implementation. My expertise in coding, finance, and religious studies enables me to look at things from a very unique perspective. And the three combined are enough for research like this.” Precisely. What “unique perspective” when you are, quite literally, the same as tens of thousands of researchers, with a software and humanities background?

The aim isn’t to humiliate you, it’s to peer review your proposed area of work. If it is weak, it must be attacked and critiqued properly, that’s how you improve. That way, nobody wastes any time or money.

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Holy f*ck you actually invoked someone’s perceived religion in a research grant request instead of arguing the points… This is low even for a humanities major. Jesus Christ, it is quite visible that university didn’t do a lot for you.

Since you’re going to just use fallacies, I’m out.

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… This forum does not allow permadeletes. Your edits are always saved, @cavalla .
Speaking of, for future readers, the “cross-thread” she mentions is the thread Apple Silicon Zero-Knowledge Proving: Mobile Halo2 and Tachyon Acceleration on M-Series and A-Series Chips - #2 by cavalla

For the record, she made this cross-thread in the first place… but it’s an enjoyable read! Also, don’t hesitate to ask any questions on that thread. I promise to not be acrid.

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I have addressed the substantive questions raised about the project’s relevance, methodology, deliverables, and my qualifications. I welcome further scrutiny of those matters.

For transparency, some of the recent exchanges involve participants who are also applying for funding in the current cycle. That does not prevent them from commenting on my proposal, but I will not participate in reciprocal credential attacks or cross-thread personal disputes.

I will keep any further responses focused on the substance of this application: what Zcash-specific knowledge the project will produce, how the research will be conducted, and how the deliverables can be evaluated.

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ok maybe next time have a disclaimer first about your identity. Also, are you humiliating the entire humanities crowd?

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You literally just demonstrated why I hold many humanities majors in contempt. I deal in cryptography and facts. Who you are does not matter over what you have done and the quality of your ideas. You are literally asking me to put a disclaimer about my IDENTITY. I don’t even need to say anything more.

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I have acknowledged and corrected my inappropriate remark.

I am here to solve a question for the community. And I am welcoming all kinds of constructive comments that are not relevant to the nature of my discipline. Please identify the specific factual claim, methodological choice, or proposed deliverable that you believe is flawed, and provide the evidence or reasoning supporting your objection. I am happy to address project-specific criticism, but I will not engage with generalizations about academic disciplines or remarks about personal identity.

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“I” who?

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Please concentrate on the proposal topic and refrain from personal scrutiny

Which are one of my factual claims, methodological choices, or deliverables that are flawed

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My man, I am even more confused now :sweat_smile:

What are we talking about here? What does privacy have to do with “amanah or amanat” at all? Or the concept of tajassus is usually about “actions” (not need to say, almost always not financial), not “assets or belongings.”

I am still very much confused. Also, I think there is another blockchain called Haqq to ensure Islamic financial regulations into its monetary system.

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I’m a humanities scholar, I

I am a scholar of humanities; I don’t need AI to write my claim

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To be fair to her, the comparison being between Zcash and HAQQ is not negated by HAQQ’s existence. The topic is fair. The main issue is that is there actually a need for this? Someone using Zcash clearly prefers that no one ever know that they are using it, is it not? If it is so, then utility takes precedence over Sharia, or at least one would think so. That is the main issue here. If there was a demonstrated need of people actively refraining from Zcash specifically due to Sharia that is present in other privacy blockchains, then it would be a completely worth it field of research, but other privacy blockchains don’t implement it either, and there’s no such crowd.

Although if she can bring up some of the “Islamic scholars” she mentioned to publicly comment on this, I think it would help her case a lot.

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What? :joy:

I think I’m caught in an unnecessary fight between you two.

And I didn’t get my answer at all.