Hey Zcash community! 
I believe people adopt new technology when someone they trust puts it in their hands and shows them it works to solve their problems. Average, crypto-skeptical people judge a tool by whether it fits their life, not by its market cap or specs. Therefore, we must work inside the communities we are already a part of, demonstrating Zcash on the problems friends and colleagues face daily.
Photo left to right: Mylo (me!), a anonymous new ZODLer, Violet (fabacab)
We, the ZECsy Team, are part of both the mainstream crypto community and the adult industry.
Zcash’s technology and the people who most need it currently sit in separate rooms, and the work of adoption is the work of connecting them: bringing working demonstrations into communities that have every reason to distrust crypto, and bringing those communities’ real problems back to the people building the technology.
Over the past year we have built exactly these ties, at Exxxotica and at Berlin Blockchain Week, in workshops and post-workshop Signal chats. This project proposal funds the year that turns those connections into a durable bridge.
The ZECsy Team proposes a twelve-month events program (September 2026 through August 2027) that gives Zcash a sustained, professional in-person presence across the global crypto and privacy conference circuit, the values-aligned adult-industry circuit, and a recurring hands-on workshop series. Similar to @dismad ZECHUB’s year long grant for online education/hackathons, and the ZK AV Club’s grant for archival work, this grant proposes in-person work that is complementary and non-overlapping.
Proposed Schedule (every 3 months window):
• At least 2 mainstream crypto or tech events
• 1 adult-industry activation
• 2 weekend workshops
Over the full year, this comes to eight crypto or tech events, four adult-industry activations, and eight workshops. We have a candidate list of events for the next year with room to choose the best-fit events as dates and costs firm up.
The grant supports a four-person field crew at each major activation–the full-time lead (Mylo, readymouse), the lead educator (Violet, fabacab), a veteran, and an apprentice–on the ground for about one week per activation, plus a smaller weekend crew for each workshop. Funding the year up front lets the team plan ahead, booking flights and hotels before late-notice price increases, shipping merchandise on standard timelines instead of paying rush fees, applying for speaker slots in time, and capturing savings like the Exxxotica multi-show rate. The result is a reliable rhythm of activations that turn online awareness into hands-on onboarding and lasting relationships.
How It Works
The Flywheel: Show up, connect and earn trust, onboard and educate, support and empower others to onboard and educate in their communities.
What compounds is not attendance numbers but the network itself: the people the team befriends, the trust earned, and the apprentices it has trained. None of these reset between events, so the wheel turns faster every cycle. The team shows up and connects; a consistent, known crew earns trust. Trust turns into speaker slots and invitations, that trusted position lets the team route value in both directions, carrying user problems up to core developers and new capabilities back down to users. Workshops and the post-workshop Signal support chats onboard new users, with ongoing technical support and critical communications about network upgrades and new capabilities. The apprentices become teachers, onboarding their own students in turn, multiplying the team’s capacity for the next cycle.
Photo: Violet was invited to speak during ETHCC Cannes on a privacy panel, because of a relationship founded in Buenos Aires a few months prior.
What We’re Proposing
Every three-month window:
- 2 mainstream crypto or tech events
- 1 adult-industry activation
- 2 weekend workshops
Across the full year: 8 crypto/tech events, 4 adult-industry activations, and 8 workshops.
We work from a candidate list rather than a locked calendar, with final selection ~90 days out based on cost, speaker/booth acceptance, and audience fit. Candidates include:
- Sep–Nov 2026: Boston Blockchain Week, ETHGlobal Tokyo + Korea Blockchain Week, Devconnect Mumbai, Solana Breakpoint London, Australian Crypto Convention, Exxxotica NJ
- Dec–Feb 2027: Exxxotica Miami, interNEXT/AVN Las Vegas, ETHDenver
- Mar–May 2027: EthCC Cannes, ETHPrague, Consensus, TOKEN2049, a spring Exxxotica
- Jun–Aug 2027: Berlin Blockchain Week, Permissionless, Blockchain.RIO, DWeb-style gatherings, an early-summer Exxxotica
We also intend one larger flagship activation in 2027, in the spirit of the Berlin Späti, likely at ETHDenver or another major conference. ETHGlobal has not yet released it’s 2027 schedule, but typically hosts hackathon and conferences every 2-3 months.
Coordinating, Not Duplicating
This is the in-person counterpart to Zcash’s well-funded online presence. ZecHub owns online education and hackathons; the Ryan’s ZK AV Club owns media and archival work (ryan.taylor). We work the room.
We’ll actively coordinate event selection with the ZK AV Club, either aligning at the same events where a combined Zcash presence is stronger, or intentionally splitting so Zcash reps cover more ground. (Berlin was a good proof of this, having their podcast crew at our Späti made both efforts better.)
The Team
- Lead coordinator: Mylo Bennett (readymouse ), full-time across the year, owns calendar, budget, logistics, partnerships, and the monthly forum reports
- Lead educator: Vi (fabacab), workshop curriculum and teaching, technical communication, developer relations, apprentice mentorship
- Community connector: Molly Simmons, workshop planning and venue/attendee recruitment through local adult-industry organizations
- Demonstrations developer: Zach M., builds the CipherPay iPad demo into a full point-of-sale and merchant flow to show vendors at a booth what it would look like to accept ZEC.
Plus a four-person crew on the ground at each major activation: the lead, the lead educator, a veteran, and an apprentice.
Left: Berlin Blockchain week with Violet, Mylo, apprentice Justine, veteran Cosmo @cos .
Middle: Exxxotica Chicago with apprentice Bee, Violet, Mylo and apprentice Kat
Right: ETHDenver Mylo, Violet and Cosmo’s first trip with us as an apprentice.
The ZECsy Apprentice Program
Every activation doubles as hands-on training. Alongside our veterans we bring an apprentice, often a former student of Violet’s privacy workshops, who learns the Zcash onboarding flow through repeated real conversations in the field. Today’s apprentice becomes tomorrow’s veteran.
So far: Cosmo at ETHDenver, Bee and Kat at Exxxotica Chicago, Justine at Berlin, and soon Molly heading into Amsterdam in a few weeks.
Apprentices come mostly from gig-work and adjacent communities, people for whom financial privacy isn’t a luxury but a practical necessity.
During Exxxotica Chicago, apprentice Bee and Kat learned to talk about zcash over the course of 3-days with over 600 people visiting our booth. That’s hands-on learning!
Track Record
Prior ZCG-funded and community-funded activations: ETHBoulder/ETHDenver, ETHCC Cannes, Exxxotica Chicago, Berlin Blockchain Week, DWeb Camp, and Cypherpunk Week Amsterdam (upcoming). Links below.
Berlin’s Zcash Privacy Späti with Webzero drew 912 unique attendees and remains our best evidence that an owned side event is what turns presence into onboarding.
Primary KPIs
- New shielded wallets created, attributed by event (primary onboarding metric)
- Documented conversations per activation
- Workshop attendance, completions, and how many left with a working wallet
- Retention signal: participation in post-workshop Signal support chats
- New contacts and potential integration partners engaged
- Apprentices trained and advanced to veteran
- Field reports routed to the teams that own each piece (protocol, wallets, POS, on-ramps, payroll/accounting)
- Monthly forum report with metrics and spend, posted within 7 days of month end
- Trip report per activation within 1 week, with photos and numbers
The Ask
Payments fund the month ahead rather than reimbursing the month behind, which is what lets us book flights early, ship merch on standard timelines, and hit speaker application deadlines. One startup payment on Sept 1, then 11 milestones, each released against the prior month’s delivered work and forum report.
Full line-item budget, including actuals from our past funded events, is in the attached workbook in the Github Issue.
Closing Remarks
We’d genuinely love feedback from the community on this one, especially on event selection and on where you’d most want Zcash represented next year. And if you’ve worked with us at any of these events, a comment means a lot to the review.
Thanks for reading, and for everything you do to support the Zcash community. 
Supporting links:
- Buenos Aires - Devconnect
- ETHDenver
- ETHCC Cannes
- Exxxotica Chicago
- Berlin Blockchain Week
- dweb
- Cypherpunk Week in Amsterdam
- Mylo’s ZCG Candidate - June
- Github Issue for this Grant
Gratitude 
Many thanks to ZCG for funding us in the past and for believing in the utility of in-person outreach. We deeply appreciate Ryan Taylor’s support, for filming our workshops and interviews, and for his continued friendship across the many events we’ve attended together.
A shout-out to Neal at @BostonZcash for hosting small community events that really embody the spirit of the Zcash community: welcoming, fiercely technical, and growing. It’s there that we’ve made friends with Zcash miners, @shieldedmark from Shielded Labs, the Cypherpunk Investment team, and several Zcash founders, and where we most recently met @zooko in real life. From Paul Bringer’s PGP policy pancakes in DC to DWeb’s rustic tech talks in the woods, there are many facets to the privacy community, and I firmly believe it takes all kinds.
To the friends we’ve met along our travels: Jason McGee (aquietinvestor) and @pacu in Buenos Aires, and Zerodartz, Ryan (ryan.taylor) and @robmarn of the ZK AV Club at Devconnect. It’s a treat and a privilege to learn from each of you. Thanks also to @Kenbak , whose CipherPay work underpins our point-of-sale demo and who has been generous with on-call technical support when we’ve needed it. To @elzz-ux for sharing the vision of the importance of in person onboarding. Thanks to the Webzero team for their collaboration and support during Berlin Blockchain week’s Späti.
Final thanks to @emersonian , a friend of many years, for introducing us to this amazing community. It was that personal connection that drew us in, and it’s the same welcoming, fiercely technical community we want to keep growing by welcoming in our crypto-adjacent communities and their members.
Stay ZECsy, my friends.
