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

[cavalla]

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:

Grant Application - Legitimacy Beyond Transparency: Zcash, Privacy, and Trust in Islamic Digital Finance

The Central Claim

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

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?

Thank you for reading. I welcome any kind of questions, criticism, and suggestions as I refine the project.