Grant Application - Zcash Privacy Payment Rail & NFC Programmable Cards

Community Grants Applications
1

We’re building ZecPOS Core — an open-source payment rail designed to make shielded ZEC practical for everyday commerce.

The idea is simple: a customer should be able to pay a merchant with shielded ZEC, while the merchant gets a familiar checkout experience without sacrificing the privacy that makes Zcash unique.

We’re working on:

Shielded ZEC payments using the Orchard shielded pool
Merchant checkout for real-world payments
Fast payment detection & confirmation with diversified payment addresses
ZEC retention + optional fiat settlement for merchants
Selective disclosure using Zcash viewing keys when reporting is required
NFC/Tap-to-Pay infrastructure for ZEC payments
Open-source, self-hostable infrastructure that other wallets, merchants and payment providers can build on

Blink will be the first production deployment, but the goal is bigger than Blink.

We want to contribute a reusable payment layer to the Zcash ecosystem — infrastructure that makes it easier for developers and businesses to build real-world commerce around shielded ZEC.

Zcash gives us private money. We’re building the rails to spend it.

We’d love feedback from the Zcash community, especially developers and builders working around Orchard, wallets, payments, lightwalletd, selective disclosure and Zcash UX.

What would you want to see in an open-source Zcash payment rail?

https://github.com/ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants/issues/456

1 Like
Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 10/12/2026
2

This project seems to have major overlap with the CipherPay project by @Kenbak , https://www.cipherpay.app/en . The differences seem in integration with Blink and potentially the NFC components? Is there something I’m missing that set this apart from this previously funded open source Point of Sales systems?

Source code for CipherPay: Atmosphere Labs · GitHub

3

Thanks for the question, @readymouse, and for pointing us to CipherPay, we have reviewed it.

From what we understand, CipherPay is a web-checkout payment processor.

ZecPOS Core targets a different layer: the settlement, custody and in-person payment stack beneath a checkout. Specifically:

Fiat settlement with ZEC retention. Merchants choose what percentage stays as shielded ZEC and what settles to local fiat through aggregated treasury batches. This needs a signing service, KMS-backed key management and destination policies, which are separate from invoice detection.

NFC tap-to-pay. NTAG 424 DNA SUN verification with counter-based replay protection, bringing contactless payments to shielded ZEC.

Android POS with a self-custody upgrade path.

4

Thank you for your proposal. After review by ZCG and a period for community input on the forum, the committee has decided not to fund this submission. We’re grateful for the effort you put into your application and hope you’ll remain an active part of the Zcash community. Minutes