Hello Zcash community!
We have submitted a ZCG grant application for Zcash World, a one-day public event in Mumbai on Sunday, 1 November 2026, two days before Devcon 8 opens.
GitHub issue: Grant Application — Zcash World, Mumbai (Devcon 8 week) · Issue #405 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants · GitHub Requested: $20,300
What it is
Zcash World is a one-day public event in Mumbai during that week, built as a fully functioning Zcash environment. Every payment made inside the venue is a real shielded transaction. There is no cash, no UPI and no card acceptance anywhere on site.
The day is structured around nine activity areas running concurrently:
1. Registration and wallet onboarding. Two-lane check-in. Attendees with an existing wallet scan and proceed; those without receive assisted setup at a staffed desk. All of the attendees will be provided a passport, which can be stamped across different activities throughout the event. (This will be similar to an immigration process.)
2. Initial ZEC distribution. A single funding desk credits every attendee once, to a wallet they control. For most, this is the first private money they have ever received. (This will be similar to a ZEC Bank.)
3. The marketplace. Several stalls selling snacks, cold drinks, merchandise and other goods, stocked and staffed by us and priced in ZEC. Full meals and beverages are catered separately and provided free to every attendee; the Z-BAZAAR is where anything beyond that is bought, and shielded ZEC is the only accepted payment there. Because it is the only way to buy anything at the stalls, every attendee transacts at least once — and we record each transaction to measure how much they actually use what they were given. (This will be called Z-BAZAAR; bazaar means market in Indian regional languages.)
4. Device benchmarking. Twenty entry-level Android devices, plus attendee phones contributed with consent, benchmarked continuously through the day for shielded sync time, proving time, memory usage, thermal behaviour and failure modes. Results displayed live and published as an open dataset. (This will be Z-Research, where research-based discussion and findings will happen.)
5. Main stage. A continuous programme of educational talks, panels and product demos, alongside project booths on the floor — some sessions in English, some in Indian regional languages including Hindi. (This will be Z-School, since everyone is learning about Zcash here.)
6. Privacy installation. A large-format display of a complete transparent transaction history, showing every amount, date and counterparty. It is positioned on the path attendees walk immediately after being funded. The wallet shown is used with consent and displayed without any identifying information; the purpose is not to expose an individual but to demonstrate what a public ledger reveals about anyone who uses one. The contrast between the private transaction they have just received and the fully exposed history in front of them is the clearest argument the day makes, and it is made before anyone has heard a talk.
7. Media operation. A roving reporting desk covering the event through the day: photography, interviews, live social coverage, a pre-movie and an after-movie. (This will be Zec-News: a dedicated news reporter with a camera operator, continuously shooting across the activity areas.)
8. Project booths, staffed throughout. Five dedicated booths run for the full day. Every booth is staffed by our core team by default, with materials, messaging and priorities agreed with each project in advance. Where a project’s own team is able to attend, they take the booth over and we support them. Nothing here depends on anyone travelling.
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Zodl. This booth doubles as the funding desk described above. It is where attendees without a wallet are set up, where the initial ZEC distribution happens, and where anyone who gets stuck during the day comes back to. Staffing it with people who know the wallet well is what makes 250–300 onboardings possible in a single day.
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Open Light Nodes. Zcash India’s own infrastructure project: an independent Zebra and lightwalletd deployment serving light clients from Mumbai. The booth explains what a light-client server does, why geographic distribution of that infrastructure matters for latency and censorship-resistance in Asia, and how the endpoint we run connects to the wallets in the room. Run by our team throughout.
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ZecHub. The ecosystem’s education and contributor pipeline. The booth covers the wiki, the bounty board and how to earn ZEC for documentation, design, translation, content and code, how the DAO works and how anyone can submit a proposal, the newsletter, and the hackathon. The goal is concrete: attendees leave knowing exactly how to make a first contribution and get paid for it. We will coordinate with the ZecHub team on what to prioritise, and hand the booth over if any of them are in Mumbai.
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Zecmap. The merchant map built by the Zcash Türkiye team, showing where ZEC is accepted worldwide. Five Indian businesses are already listed. Coordinated with Batuhan and the Türkiye team on design and messaging. It connects directly to our merchant campaign: businesses onboarded during Devcon week appear on the map, and attendees can see the network they have just joined growing during the week.
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Zapp. A fork of Zodl that adds end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer messaging with shielded ZEC sendable inside a chat, and a scan-and-pay offramp that includes UPI in India. For an Indian audience this is the most directly relevant application in the ecosystem, because it answers the question everyone asks after their first shielded transaction: where do I actually spend or cash this out? The Zapp team is India-based, so we have approached them to run this booth themselves. It is not yet confirmed; if they cannot attend, our team covers it as with the others.
Our core team and volunteers rotate and sync across all five through the day, so no booth is left unattended and everyone on the team can answer for every project on the floor.
9. ZEC games and fun activities. Through games and activities, attendee passports are stamped, so participation can be traced and goodies awarded. Activities include a seed-phrase challenge among others.
These areas are presented under a consistent visual identity: registration as immigration, the funding desk as a bank, the marketplace as a bazaar, the reporting desk as a newsroom. The naming gives the venue coherence and makes the day memorable and highly documentable. It is presentation. The activity underneath is what the metrics measure, and it is described plainly throughout this application.
At close we publish the day’s figures, including one no Zcash event has reported before: the total value transacted on site over the course of the day. (This can be represented as the GDP of the event.)
The event is the middle of the work, not the whole of it
Zcash World anchors a programme that runs in four phases. The event is the most visible part, but it is deliberately placed so that the work either side of it compounds.
In the lead-up. Venue confirmed with a campus partner and the stage programme curated. Benchmarking devices prepared, and the benchmarking methodology published for review before any data is collected. Registration opened and driven, including a pre-movie. Merchants identified and shortlisted, and the Hindi and Marathi merchant guides, signage and training material produced so the field team can move fast once they are on the ground in Mumbai.
The event. The nine activity areas above, in a single venue over a single day, two days before Devcon opens.
Through Devcon week. This is where the largest share of the work happens, and it runs on three tracks at once.
Merchant onboarding. Our Distribution and Partnerships Lead works the market areas, food streets and shops around the conference district, onboarding 20 genuine Mumbai businesses to accept ZEC — installation, staff training, signage, printed guides in Hindi and Marathi, and listing on Zecmap. Each business sets up a shielded wallet in the process. They are onboarded while the team is physically in the city and available to support them, rather than remotely and in advance.
Ecosystem engagement. Devcon brings the people who build Zcash and the people who build alongside it into one city for four days. Our team is on the floor and at partner events throughout — meeting wallet teams, protocol contributors, infrastructure projects and other regional communities. This is not networking for its own sake. We arrive carrying something specific: findings from 250–300 Indian users on entry-level hardware, and the failure modes we watched happen two days earlier. Taking those directly to the teams who own the code, in person, is worth more than any writeup. We also provide technical mentors and local builder recruitment to WebZero’s Hack-to-Dark hackathon, at no cost and with no follow-on grant.
Content capture. Filming, interviews and photography run continuously across all of it — the event, the merchant onboardings on the street, and the conversations at Devcon.
Afterwards. Publication. The benchmarking dataset released open-licensed. The after-movie published within 72 hours, while Devcon is still running and the audience is still assembled. A complete public report on the forum with every metric and a full budget breakdown.
Content is a system, not a byproduct. The pre-movie drives registration for the event. The event produces the footage and the on-the-ground material. The merchant onboardings produce the stories — a shopkeeper explaining why he said yes is more persuasive to the next shopkeeper than anything we could write. The Devcon conversations produce the ecosystem interviews. All of it is shot by one team, to one brief, and cut into one narrative: the after-movie, the report, and a body of material that keeps working for months. This is why media is a named line in the budget with a named lead, rather than something we hope a volunteer captures on a phone.
Why this is one project rather than three. Each part exists because it makes the others work. The event generates the user findings that give our Devcon-week conversations something to say. Those conversations put Zcash India in front of the teams whose software we are testing. The merchant network gives the wallets created at the event somewhere to spend afterwards, so onboarding does not decay into an unused app. The benchmarking produces a dataset that keeps being useful to wallet teams long after the room has emptied. And the content ties it into something legible to people who were not in the room.
Funding the event on its own would produce a good day. Funding the week produces a merchant network, a public dataset, a set of working relationships with the teams that build Zcash, and a community that are all still running in December.
Why we are doing it this way
India processed 23.2 billion UPI transactions in May 2026 alone, close to half of all real-time digital payments on Earth. Every one is linked to a bank account, a phone number and usually a government ID.
UPI is a genuine public good. But it also means an entire generation here has learned to handle money in a system where visibility is the default and privacy was never on offer. Most people at our events have never once made a payment an intermediary could not see.
Four things stand between Zcash and those people, and none of them are awareness problems:
- Nobody knows whether Zcash works on the hardware Indians own. There is no public data on shielded sync, proving time or failure rates for entry-level Android. We are going to produce some.
- A wallet created is not a wallet used. Every crypto event measures the first and assumes the second. We are making spending the condition of participation, and measuring it.
- There is nowhere to spend it. We are onboarding 20 real Mumbai businesses across Devcon week.
- It does not speak their language. Our Hindi localization PR for Zodl is open at 1,051 strings.
Merchandise
Design is already underway. Here is the Zcash World event t-shirt, designed in-house by our team. Every attendee receives one, and further items are in production.
Our track record
Everything below is documented month by month, publicly, since February 2026:
Six offline events across six cities and three states, roughly 1,030 attendees:
| Event | Attendees |
|---|---|
| AITR / Acropolis, Indore | ~184 |
| GITS, Udaipur | 192 |
| Vadodara | 229 |
| Bhopal | 216 |
| Surat | 160, with 150+ new Zodl wallets |
| NEAR Legion x Zcash India, Ahmedabad | 50+, voluntary and outside any deliverable |
Community growth, entirely organic with zero paid promotion: X from 1 to 1,536, Telegram from 5 to 1,332.
Five online events at 70 to 82 live attendees each. Three developer workshops. Four bounty programmes with 80+ submissions and 45+ people paid in ZEC.
Udaipur after-movie:
Indore after-movie:
Budget
| USD | |
|---|---|
| Service costs | 15,900 |
| Compensation (5 people, 6 weeks) | 4,400 |
| Hardware / software | 0 |
| Total | 20,300 |
Devices for benchmarking are arranged by our team and are not charged to this grant.
Coordination
We are providing technical mentors and local builder recruitment to WebZero’s Hack-to-Dark on 4 to 5 November at no cost and with no follow-on grant, and WebZero are reciprocating with marketing and production support here. No funds move in either direction. We are also coordinating with ZecHub and running recruitment through HackTour India’s campus network.
We would genuinely value feedback, especially on the programme and on which ecosystem projects the community would most want to see on the floor. If you are going to be in Mumbai for Devcon and want to take part, please say so here.
Thanks for reading.
Jatin Sahijwani Zcash India | @ZcashIND | t.me/ZcashIN