I’m enthusiastic about this grant not only because it unlocks a NAM airdrop, but because the underlying research could become for future Zcash mechanisms that we don’t fully know how to build yet.
There are two directions where I believe this work might become strategically important for the community.
1) Deprecation paths for legacy shielded pools
As discussed in the Sprout thread, Zcash will inevitably need to retire old protocols over time. Whether it’s Sprout today, or Sapling pool, the recurring challenge is the same: how do we give users a safe, private and realistic way to “claim” assets from a pool that is no longer maintained?
When I raised this idea earlier (link below), it was just a rough thought, but this grant now makes it feel less hypothetical. A carefully designed “claim by proving private ownership at snapshot height” abstraction could become a standardized exit mechanism for deprecated pools.
@str4d proposed very interesting pathway using ZSA, which I truly like, but it requires those assets to exist.
2) Making coinholder voting more accessible and less risky
I deeply respect the work done so far. We have real progress, but participation numbers show that the current process is still too heavy for most holders. Running nodes, carefully timing for votes and exposing seed to a standalone voting tool is intimidating, especially once ZEC is more valuable. Many holders understandably don’t want to move funds or manage technical risks just to vote.
One idea is to use a shielded snapshot mechanism to mint temporary voting tokens in another network (for example Namada today, or ZSA later). These tokens could represent voting power proportional to shielded ZEC holdings and allow users to vote without touching their actual ZEC, without timing windows, and without exposing secrets to additional software.
This is just a sketch, but the key is separation between ownership assets and governance.
I’m excited to follow the progress, and I appreciate everyone involved for pushing this frontier forward.