Grant Application: Chain.Love - ecosystem marketplace

Community Grants
1

Preamble

Hey, forum :slight_smile:
As a good engineer I’m a bit lazy to write hundreds lines of a custom grant application before knowing whether anyone is actually interested in what I’m about to propose. Since a post here is a must-have anyway, I’ve decided to start with it, mainly to see if there is at least some tension or interest around what we are building at Chain.Love.

I see that the forum is quite active here, so I’d really appreciate a feedback - even negative. A clear “no” is better silence, cuz at least you know why you are failing.

Fable

Problem statement

So, let me start this with a simple question.

How do you personally discover services available in the ZCash ecosystem?

While doing my research I cam up with Discover the Zcash Ecosystem - Z.Cash [1] It looks nice, but how do I actually use it? Let’s say I’m a user who just wants to check a transaction. I go to the ecosystem page, filter for block explorers… and then I see several options.

image
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Which one of these should I choose?
How it differs from one another?[2]
Which one fits my use case?

That is the problem we are aiming to solve at Chain.Love.

What is Chain.Love?

As a part of a team I have been working on a platform that can be described as a “marketplace” of Web3 services. It’s key component is called “Toolbox” - a place to discover, compare and access different services available over the ecosystem:

example
example1779×894 196 KB

What I think this community might appreciate is that the Toolbox is built on top of the open-source database => GitHub - Chain-Love/chain-love: Open-source collaborative database of all the Web3 infrastructure services. Discover, compare and access Web3 services seamlessly at https://chain.love .
Anyone can contribute to. It is best suited for active ecosystems, where the community helps keep information fresh — and everyone benefits from that. This model fits better than traditional ecosystem pages in terms of convenience, reliability, and independence, one may certainly compare it to the well-known ChainList[3], where information is pretty much always up to date.

We would love to deploy Chain.Love over ZCash, and I’m curious here whether you see the value in such a solution?

Roadmap: Transactional marketplace

As a more advanced topic, we are also currently developing a transactional layer on top of our marketplace, defining integration standards (API specs, etc.), so providers can plug-in their solutions and sell them in a fully automated mode.

This part is not built yet. We are also looking for an ecosystem that might be interested in funding this development, to secure a flow of purchases through the native token (ZEC). It’s a bigger investment, but also a much bigger outcome once real transactions start flowing.

Summary

So, in short, there are two possible paths:

  • a discovery / comparison layer (Toolbox)

  • or a fully-featured services marketplace

I’m very curious whether either of these aligns with the current interests and priorities of the ZCash ecosystem.

P.S. I noticed that in the past there were shared grants between Filecoin and ZCash. Just to add some context: Chain.Love has been working with Filecoin for several years, our solution is fully live there, and we were recognized as the best ecosystem project in one of Filecoin’s RetroPGFs. We also operate RPC-as-a-service there, so in a fairly complex environments. If there’s interest in expanding RPC provider options for ZCash, that’s also something we could explore.

Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to read this. Any feedback — positive or negative — is genuinely appreciated.

Looking forward to your thoughts,

Arsenii

  1. Also, it seems that pages on this website are stalling a bit, at least me doing my homework found that some of them are just not changing since 2023 ↩︎

  2. Sure, the obvious answer is “go and study”, but there is a fine line between RTFM and obscurity, at some point you’re no longer learning, but diging through each one of these links just to understand whether certain explorer has the functionality I need. ↩︎

  3. One may ask then - why don’t we simply have ChainList for ZCash, but the answer is on a surface - ChainList does not support non-EVM networks, and does not support anything beyond mere RPCs. ↩︎

2 Likes
Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 2/3/2026
2

Just a quick follow-up here, still waiting for opinions.
I see we have some intersections with other ideas described on Forum regarding x402 protocol, like z402 and this proposal: Proposal: Privacy-Preserving ZEC Payments for Autonomous AI Agents - #3 by ArseniiPetrovich

I asked there a few questions, but sadly hearing silence only.
So, trying to bump my message in hope anyone from the board (@ZCG ) could see and provide a feedback.
Thanks.

3

Since I sadly didn’t get a response from @ZCG around why this other x402 proposal was declined, I decided to focus solely on a discoverability problem described above with a potential of Chain.Love becoming one of the first users of z402 or any other similar solutions shall they become available in zCash ecosystem in the future.
For now I prefer to keep the scope concise with clearly seen benefits for the ecosystem participants, while keeping r&d functionality out of scope for now.

Sadly, I didn’t also get much of a feedback over Chain.Love here in the forum as well, but got couple of likes, which makes me think it wouldn’t harm actually forming a proposal for a grant. Having that said, here is my grant application: Grant Application - {Application Name} · Issue #194 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants · GitHub

Still looking forward for any feedback and/or more likes :slight_smile:
Cheers!

4

I may be mistaken, and I would genuinely welcome being shown a different path, but based on my experience the most common pattern for finding information about a blockchain today looks somewhat different.

When someone is looking for basic information about an ecosystem, its infrastructure, or surrounding services, they usually start from well-known anchor points such as CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, or similar aggregators. These platforms have a clear monetization model, strong brand recognition, and established trust. They typically serve as hubs that link to the official community website, popular explorers, Q&A channels, and other essential resources.

In recent years, an additional layer has emerged: direct queries to AI systems, which are now embedded almost everywhere and often provide answers faster than any specialized catalog.

In your proposal, I see an assumption that users will follow a different pattern. Namely, that they will come to a dedicated infrastructure marketplace as their entry point. To be completely honest, before reading this application I had never heard of your service, and that makes it difficult for me to understand how you plan to reach the “first line” of resource discovery for developers.

From my experience, most successful commercial services - whether classifieds, navigation tools, or search engine, operated for many years essentially for free in order to build an audience and trust. Only after that did they either introduce monetization or get acquired by larger players.

Unfortunately, the crypto market often encourages the opposite expectation: requesting funding for development before there is a clear understanding of how a large and sustainable audience will be reached. As a result, many projects fail not because the idea is bad, but because real demand never materializes.

I looked at publicly available traffic estimates for Chain.Love. As far as I can tell, the current level of usage is on the order of a few hundred unique visitors per month, with noticeable one-off spikes followed by a return to a low baseline.

Could you explain in more detail which specific channels and user journeys you are relying on to bring Chain.Love to a level of broad adoption, rather than remaining a niche catalog known only to people already inside the ecosystem?

5

Thank you for the detailed feedback, @artkor! This concern is valid, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify.

Indeed, preliminary discovery on business level and on user level usually happens via large aggregators (CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, DefiLlama) or, increasingly, via AI. These are excellent entry points for token-level and high-level information. We, as a Chain.Love, are not trying to replace them, and the regular user is not our primary target audience. The real gap appears one step later, when someone actually wants to build.

Once a developer decides “I want to build on Zcash”, the questions immediately become practical and comparative:

  • Which RPC providers exist, and which have usable free tiers?

  • What are the rate limits, hosting regions, features, and trade-offs?

  • Are there bridges, indexers, SDKs, monitoring tools?

  • How do I compare options side-by-side without visiting 10 sites and reading inconsistent docs?[1]

Today, there is no neutral, structured, up-to-date answer to these questions. The reality is:

  • static link lists in docs,

  • scattered knowledge,

  • hours of manual comparison.

This is the precise problem Chain.Love solves: services discovery, comparison and access, not hype, not prices, not tokens.

Why not rely on AI alone?

Because AI is only as good as its sources. Web3 service data is fragmented, non-standardized, and changes frequently. As a result, generic AI answers about RPCs, pricing, limits, or features are often outdated or simply wrong.

Try for yourself! Imagine you are an engineerthat wants to build adApp… on Ethereum. You don’t have much money, but your app will be super RPC call-intensive. Now, try asking any AI you know on what is a cheapest RPC provider on Ethereum from the query fee perspective. I can predict the answer more or less, since we used to run these tests dozens of times: “Absolutely! Here are the top-3 providers on Ethereum with lowest access fee as of <CURRENT_MONTH> 2026!” And then it will give you a list of 3 random provider names and their hardly comparable query fees, while proofing it with an article written back in 2023. Now, try this for a change: ``https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68bf52c0b60c8191a56c6f98959b97ec-chain-love``.

Chain.Love exists as the structured data layer AI can reliably query. The more ecosystems like Zcash adopt this structured layer, the more accurate AI answers about them become—everywhere, not just on our site.

Adoption: how users actually arrive

Of course, we have a structured plan on how to attract more users and make our product more visible.

Our adoption paths are:

  1. Search indexing – comparison pages (“RPC A vs RPC B”, “Best free Zcash RPCs”) indexed by the search engines similarly to Versus-style sites.

  2. AI ingestion – MCP / structured access so LLMs pull fresh web3 services data instead of hallucinating.

  3. Docs integration – The widget is basically a light embeddable version of Chain.Love that you may include into your network documentation. [2]

  4. Providing additional functionality on top - monitoring and load balancer as a service. Also, developing a transactional marketplace will solve a problem of services being scattered too much[3].

  5. Developers motivation - we believe that no matter how much we try we will not be able to keep up with the pace of changes in the such a rapidly developing ecosystem as Web3. This is why we’ve realized, that the path to succeed here - is to motivate those working with the chains - developers - to contribute into our database. For that purpose we’ve made it open-source, and for that purpose we are running a reward program, giving tiny, but stable[coin] rewards to those contributing. We are maitaining a balance by not providing too high bounties (and yet providing tangible ones) to ensure we attract visioners, not bounty hunters.

  6. DevRel alignment – positioning Chain.Love as a complement to official docs, not a replacement. This approach has already been positively validated with DevRel teams and developers across multiple ecosystems (Arbitrum, Algorand, Filecoin, Flare, Sonic, Somnia). Here are the few examples of ecosystems posting about us:

Also, quite an interesting post from one of our contributors I’ve seen during this weekend:

P.S.

You mentioned that many successful platforms operated for years for free before monetizing. I understand, and the team working on Chain.Love understands that as well. While we believe we have found a way to speed up adoption as much as possible - it still gonna take some time for more people to learn about us. Like, you did :slight_smile:
This grant is not designed to “make money”, but rather to make impact. It is to:

  • build and maintain high-quality, open, structured services’ data for Zcash,

  • integrate discovery directly into Zcash’s developer journey,

  • and lay groundwork for a future transactional marketplace[4] (z402/x402-style);

Yes, current traffic is modest (although, Google Analytics shows us around ~5 times higher number that the one you’ve provided). That is expected at this stage. Google, Booking, and Amazon also didn’t become famous during their first months straight away (please, correct me if I’m wrong).

We are not asking for funding to chase hype or promise immediate scale - you are right, in web3 many are asking for this - during these months we’ve seen a number of investors leading a call with a “wen token” question straight away. But when we are talking about something, that may be Google/Amazon/Booking, just not “in a matter of months” - we get “too far fetched, in crypto we don’t think for years ahead”. This is exactly what caught my eyes in zCash community - I’m seeing people who are interested in building something that matters, not “hype on memecoins”. I’m asking for support to build boring, necessary ecosystem component that reduces friction for every developer who wants to build on Zcash - and to do it openly, patiently, and correctly.

That is why this grant and this project matters.

  1. Developing this scenario - let me compare this process with purchasing a mobile phone. Shall you google for “Iphone 17 vs Samsung S20 Pro” you will see a number of Versus-like websites that does the comparison. We leverage this idea and index our comparison pages making Google advance us in the search. ↩︎

  2. Yes, there is a security concern on how may you embed 3rd-party website into the network docs, but we’ve developed it in a way that mitigates this issue - you just fork the Chain.Love’s open-source database and run widget on your own server, so we don’t have access neither to the executed code, nor to a database (data source). ↩︎

  3. Current “decentralized” RPCs are not really “decentralized” because their services are still provided via a centralized gateway. You can’t really “trick” the basics of infrastructure engineers - there still have to be a point of access. In our eyes decentralized RPC should look more like a marketplace, where you can get services from providers you want to work with, while accessing their services still directly. ↩︎

  4. Where we benefit from privacy features of ZCash, and ZCash benefits from the higher transactions volume. ↩︎

2 Likes
6

Thank you for your submission. After consideration from ZCG and sufficient time for the community to provide feedback on the forum, the committee has decided to reject this proposal.

The committee appreciates your grant submission efforts and encourages you to continue as an active member of the Zcash community going forward!