I am Khizir Esmars, founder of V ERA POWER. We have submitted a grant application to the Zcash Community Grants program and invite your feedback.
Project Summary
V ERA POWER (thevpn.org) is a profitable, bootstrapped DePIN VPN constructor on Telegram with 90,000 monthly active users. Our project aims to integrate shielded ZEC payments directly into our Telegram Mini App. This will provide a truly private payment method for our users in high-censorship regions (Russia, Iran, etc.) who currently risk exposure when paying for VPN services via bank cards or transparent cryptocurrencies.
Why This Matters for Zcash
Mass Adoption: This integration makes Zcash a primary payment option for nearly 100,000 real users, creating a strong daily use case.
Real-World Privacy: It solves a critical “financial privacy gap” for at-risk users, leveraging Zcash’s core strength—shielded transactions—in a practical, life-improving application.
Ecosystem Growth: We plan to release our payment integration code as an open-source “Telegram Zcash Payment SDK”, allowing any other bot developer to easily add ZEC support.
Technical & Budget Overview
Total Request: $54,400 USD.
Key Milestones:
Backend Payment Gateway: Development and deployment of a service to generate Unified Addresses and listen for ZEC transactions.
Full User Integration: Launch of the “Pay with Zcash” feature in the production bot for all 90,000 users, complete with marketing.
Link to Full Application: You can review the complete technical details, milestones, and budget breakdown in our application on GitHub: #158
We Value Your Input
We have built our product by listening to our community, and we want to extend this approach to the Zcash ecosystem. We welcome all constructive feedback, technical suggestions, or questions you may have about this proposal.
Read more about our future tokenomics and roadmap on uspn.io
The working product for users which let’s anyone create his own brand name VPN Business with Telegram Bot and Website is on https://thevpn.org
Thank you for your time and attention guys
Best Regars
USPN Team
It looks like your business model is to offer private-labeling/drop-shipping like services for VPNs? Is that correct?
Team: Can you share github or LinkedIn profiles for your team, including Nikita Yakovles, so we can better understand the team’s technical qualifications that would support this project?
Other options: What is your current crypto payment processor system, BTCPayServer or something similar? Are there other Telegram-based payment processors supporting ZEC that could be integrated rather than developing a new one?
Success metric: In github I see, ”Volume: Achieving >$5,000 monthly transaction volume in ZEC within the first 6 months.” Do you expect this to be NEW volume, or current users switching payment methods? If new volume, it seems like self-funding the $50k project would turn a profit in within a year or so.
Is there some way this could be structured more like a loan then a grant, with some % returned to ZCG based off the monthly transaction volume? Can some collaboration be reached where this is a win-win for both the Zcash community and the company?
Pending further information, I would not support approval at this time.
22 years in tech, cybersecurity background (Positive Technologies)
Contract developers under NDA
Can provide additional verification if needed
Current Crypto Infrastructure Testing TON-based smart contract for payments. No legacy crypto processor. Existing Telegram ZEC solutions don’t scale for 90K users without KYC. Our solution will be open-source SDK for the ecosystem.
Success Metrics $5,000 monthly ZEC volume: 60% existing users from high-risk regions switching from fiat, 40% new privacy-focused users.
Win-Win Collaboration Proposal
Beyond payment integration, we can create a Zcash-Exclusive VPN Partnership:
Separate VPN service tier: ZEC-only payments + ZCash wallet authorization
Enhanced privacy tier leveraging Zcash shielded protocol for server-level encryption
Premium pricing with transaction fees generating continuous ZEC volume
Smart contract tokenomics (similar to uspn.io model) built specifically for ZCash ecosystem
Technical scope: This goes beyond current grant request. Full ZCash-native infrastructure with decentralized node network.
Future Integration: We’re launching on TON (accepted to TON Family), building on Solana, and developing VPN mining nodes. These miners can support multiple tokens—including potential ZCash integration for node operators.
Context: ZCash was the first cryptocurrency I ever mined. The privacy and security model aligns perfectly with VPN server encryption requirements in the $60B VPN market.
Or read more about Tokenomics and blockchain integration (uspn.io)
Then let’s discuss which collaboration model makes most sense for both ecosystems.
P.S. Take a look our AI generated video, it’s not a gameplay and demonstration, it’s about ideology what we’re moving further. And keep in mind - this is the first solution in the world, which let’s anyone build their own VPN business so easy
Thank you for submitting your proposal. After review by the ZCG and consideration of community feedback on the forum, the committee has determined that this proposal falls outside the current scope of the Zcash Grant Program and will not be funded.
We appreciate the effort you put into your submission and encourage you to stay engaged with the Zcash community and consider future proposals that align more closely with the program’s objectives.
So funny, blockchain based on security disagree first VPN builder. Thank you, will be happy if you give more feedback about what was so far away from program’s objectives?
Personally, I do not believe that a standalone website acting as a VPN aggregator provides meaningful value to the Zcash ecosystem.
In some of the countries mentioned in the proposal (and I am originally from Russia myself), traffic to many of the listed VPN services is already effectively blocked, making these services largely unusable. Users who rely on VPNs via Telegram are unlikely to use an external website to discover solutions, as Telegram already provides native search and discovery mechanisms. In practice, such a site would also be difficult to access in regions where VPN-related websites are actively blocked by search engines and regulators.
Additionally, integrating ZEC payments today is not a particularly complex task. Solutions like BTCPayServer already make this feasible without significant cost. A number of services have successfully implemented ZEC payments, including NymVPN, LNVPN, nicevps.ne and coin.host
Taken together, these factors make the practical impact and adoption potential of this proposal unclear, and the risk of funding it relatively high.
Thank you for your detailed feedback. I appreciate your perspective, especially given your background from Russia - you understand the blocking challenges firsthand.
However, I believe there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about what VERA POWER actually is. We’re not building a “VPN aggregator website” - we’re building a no-code VPN constructor platform that enables anyone to create and monetize their own VPN business in 2-5 minutes.
Regarding blocking concerns:
You’re absolutely right that traditional VPN services are being blocked. That’s precisely why we’ve developed DPI Bypass technology that is currently being successfully tested on our platform. This technology specifically addresses the blocking issues you mentioned - it’s designed to work in the most restrictive environments, including Russia and similar markets.
Since you’re originally from Russia and understand these challenges intimately, I’d love to invite you to test our DPI Bypass technology firsthand. You’ll see that this isn’t theoretical - it’s working right now for our 91,299 users.
P.S. I’m not pushing on grant, i would like to save this post for saying “told ya”
If you provide me with any evidence that you are a contributor to Zapret, I will take your application more seriously.
PS.
Context for forum members: Zapret is free, open-source software that allows traffic to be masked so that regulators cannot recognize it as VPN traffic.
Roskomnadzor (government content blocker) has now learned to identify data types by packets, and standard VPN providers are completely blocked. Not just at the level of websites or applications, but even if you set up your own VPN on an international VPS, it will also be blocked.
Zapret is used by literally everyone today, even schoolchildren playing the blocked Roblox.
The authors of the project deserve great respect and point to the repositories in the first paragraph: “ATTENTION, beware of scammers. Zapret is free and open source. Anyone who forces you to download Zapret only from their resource is violating the MIT license.”
My friend, your Zapret always have to configure servers and check availability for each mobile provider, when our system learn packets for first 30 ms and keep and mind and cache and routing different strategy for a different providers.
Here everybody asking about Github, but wth? We were working for the project not for just sharing the whole code with everybody.
If anybody have any doubts, just go and try to create it on our platform.
P.S. I don’t need to be a contributor of Zapret for make it better, but manual stuff for a Global project literally doesn’t work, so we had to create something better with QUIC and more FAKE TLS strategies.
If you are really in it, let’s just take a conversation and forget about taking my application more seriously and about grant, we’re already monetized and looking for a opportunity to grow up faster, because we’re finally on the final stage, at the point where we were going last 3.5 years.
