Hi all, posting here alongside a ZCG application, as the process requires. GitHub issue: [https://github.com/ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants/issues/448\]
Some of you have already seen our work. In April we published a Zcash Ecosystem Mapping (updated in August) covering 128 active projects. In June we published the State of Decentralized Privacy summit edition, an independent assessment of whether privacy technology actually reaches the people who need it: 826 projects across every major ecosystem.
I want to explain what that report found about Zcash, what it could not find, and what we are asking for.
Zcash was the strongest finding in it
Between early 2024 and May 2026, the share of ZEC supply held in shielded addresses rose from roughly 8% to about 30%. No protocol change in that window. Zashi/Zodl made shielded the default and behavior followed.
We used that as the report’s central evidence that defaults decide adoption, because nothing else in the ecosystem demonstrates it as cleanly. Zashi/Zodl also tied for the lowest setup-step count of the eight tools we audited, and was one of only two with a full mobile application.
I want to be direct about why that matters more coming from us than from a Zcash-funded report. In a Zcash-only publication, “30% of supply is shielded” is a claim. In a report that also finds only 24% of the privacy ecosystem ships privacy on by default, that zero of 21 evaluated Ethereum wallets pass a basic privacy criterion, and that 7.8% of privacy projects have ever been independently audited; the same number is evidence. The contrast with 825 projects that did not achieve this is what makes the argument land with journalists, policymakers and builders in other ecosystems. Comparative research can produce that framing.
What we could not do
The UX audit was a desk audit. Time-to-first-transaction, proof generation time and error rates all had to be flagged as untested, because measuring them honestly means installing the wallet and moving real funds, not reading documentation. So the report says clean things about Zcash’s design and nothing about how it actually performs on a phone.
And the Orchard disclosure landed one day before we published. We included it prominently rather than dropping it, and framed it accurately as evidence of an ecosystem-wide audit gap rather than as an argument against Zcash. But we had no room to analyze what a four-year-old soundness flaw in one of the most scrutinized systems in the field implies for the 92.2% of privacy projects with no published audit at all.
What the grant funds
The full report aims to launch at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress on 2 November and closes those gaps across every ecosystem it covers. This grant funds the Zcash component, with all Zcash-specific results published as standalone open datasets to be usable by this community whether or not you care about the rest of the report.
- Live measurement of Zcash wallets on real devices with real funds, installed without prior exposure to the software: time to first shielded transaction, proof generation time, sync behaviour, error modes. Each measurement repeated at least three times, all raw timings published rather than medians alone.
- A proper written case study on Zcash as the default-on proof, published under CC BY 4.0, including the Orchard analysis we did not have room for.
- A refresh of the ecosystem mapping by re-verifying the 128 entries against repository commits and site availability, folding in the corrections already requested in that thread including Gem Wallet, and restructuring it as maintained data we can hand over so it stops depending on us.
Disclosures
- Zcash has supported Web3Privacy Now events, including the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress series, and is an annual member of the movement.
- We are asking for the full $5,000 as a single payment rather than in tranches. The outputs research in parallel and publish together, and at this size tranching adds more administration than it removes risk.
- This is roughly 23% of a $21,500 research programme; the remaining ~$16,500 is raised from other supporters. This grant buys the research and no influence over the conclusions, favourable or otherwise. How we handled the Orchard disclosure is the checkable version of that claim.
- We use AI tools for drafting and code assistance. They are not used to generate findings or to produce or alter evidence. Mentioning it because the committee has previously raised it.
- The prompt to apply came from the ZECsy team, who I met in person in Amsterdam.
What I would like from this forum
- Is the measurement set the right one? If there is a failure mode or a number that matters more to you than the ones listed, say so now and it goes in.
- If you maintain a Zcash wallet or run infrastructure; do you want the procedure shared before testing, and would you use it yourself afterwards as a regression check?
- Is ZecHub the right long-term home for the refreshed mapping, or is there somewhere better?
To find more details about the grant application please refer to the github issue as the main grant application (e.g.: team, technical approach, budget, etc.)
Happy to answer anything.
