I’ve submitted a grant application, Zcash in the privacy stack, an open six-part series situating Zcash among the rest of privacy-preserving computation, FHE, MPC, and TEEs, and covering the current questions around sync and scaling and Tachyon, post-quantum migration, what a shielded chain can and cannot prove after the Orchard circuit bug, and the limits of selective disclosure.
The comparison pieces would be sourced across the field with everything published open-access and mirrored to a community resource.
I’d welcome the committee’s and community’s feedback on scope, topics, and budget. @ZcashGrants
The hard part is usually the handoff, where Zcash does settlement and other tools handle transport or identity. Which layer does this grant own, and which does it assume is there already? Where does a first time user actually feel that stack working?
The grant would be for the settlement and confidentiality layer, like what shielded Zcash proves, how it scales, what it can still prove after a circuit fault, and how its confidentiality compares to the other tools. It assumes transport and identity as adjacent layers.
Sync and Tachyon (piece 3) is settlement-to-transport and selective disclosure (piece 6) is settlement-to-identity. Like, the lag of scanning to see a shielded balance, and about proving a payment to an exchange or auditor. Both are more evaluator-facing than a first-run walkthrough. Let me know if you think that a different area deserves more focus, and I’m glad to shift it.
Thanks Stephen, we appreciate the clarification. The committee may be more open to considering this as a smaller standalone pilot at a proportional cost. Would you be open to rescoping the proposal that way? Any further work would need to be considered separately, not treated as an assumed continuation.