Grant Application - ZECsy Community Building: 12 Months of Zcash on the Ground

Community Grants
24

ZECsy Trip Report: Exxxotica, NJ, Oct 23-25th

Zcash Grassroots Marketing Team · @readymouse , @fabacab , @kate.stapes

Hello friends,

I would like to thank @ZCG for their continued support for this grant, and our outreach to the adult entertainment industry. According to Research and Markets, the adult entertainment industry is $78 billion, with the largest independent video creator market, OnlyFans, taking in $6 billion itself from fans. The average OnlyFans subscriber pays between $10 to $50 a month, and nearly 30,000 fans attended Exxxotica NJ. This represents nearly $300,000 to $1.5 million in monthly revenue opportunities that walked past the Zcash booth over the course of the weekend. More than 700 fans, creators, and vendors stopped by our booth and learned about Zcash.

We chose a kitchen theme for the booth, because the kitchen is where you gather to share ideas, get advice, share a meal, and share stories. We connect in the kitchens of our lives. Here, we give out wet wipes, Tide-stain remover wipes, and other emergency supplies. In each small kit, we included a Zcash information card and a Zcash information flyer.

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Our team from left to right: Avery, Violet, Kate, Eve, Mylo, Justine

Daily posts on Twitter (@zReadyMouse):
Day 1 [Viral Tweet]: https://x.com/zReadyMouse/status/2113735056178962574
Day 2 [Global Pandemic Tweet]: Mylo on X: "Day 2: Zcash at @EXXXOTICA . @rollergirlVi and @kate_stapes in Mama's zcash kitchen. Giving away protections for your body and your money. Privacy is ZECsy." / X
Day 3: Mylo on X: "Day 3 @EXXXOTICA: A non-profit approached us with an all too common problem. They have fiat with a fiscal sponsor, but CashApp banned their account, how can they distribute funds to their members and mutual aid recipients?" / X

Stats

  • ~700 individual interactions (tracked via SWAG distribution)

  • 2 side events attended (afterparties)

  • 1 main event + booth

  • 2 advocates and educators trained

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Cumulative Impact Summary

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We gave out over 700 plastic pouches with Zcash information cards as well as emergency supplies like wet wipes, Tide-to-go stain remover and make-up remover. Each pouch was given and at least a short conversation was had with the receiver. By tracking pouches distributed, we can track the number of conversations we have over the course of the weekend. See the information flyers we made below, soon they will be posted for other marketing teams to use.

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ZECsy Apprentice(s): Eve and Avery

  • What they took on: Onboarding and talking about Zcash at the booth and on the conference floor.

  • What they can now do unsupervised: Both Eve and Avery are comfortable walking someone through Zodl as well as talking about the features like encrypted memos and transparent vs shielded addresses. They are also able to explain and demonstrate off-ramping via crypto-backed payment card services such as KAST.

  • In their words:

    • “This weekend at Exxxotica was a transformative experience for me, as well as the dozens of people I onboarded to Zcash. Having been a Zcash evangelist online for about a year, I realized there is something magic and irreplaceable about doing this in person. Framing is everything, and people are often the victims of inertia. When you tell them about a new thing, “I’ll do it later” never comes. But when I whip out my phone and show them how easy it is, their eyes light up. People often recoil when they find out that zcash is a cryptocurrency, which is totally understandable! Crypto folks living in a bubble may not realize that crypto has a bad rap, because of all the rug pulls and scams, because of the environmental impact some blockchains have, and of course because of how shitty a large chunk of the community can be. But people understand the need for private transactions, especially as sex workers. Even though porn is legal, so many of us are being banned from venmo and cashapp, even twitter and instagram. The framing I found worked best was to “imagine signal for your money, imagine cashapp that can’t ban you, doesn’t need your ID, can’t know who you are or how much you have or who you’re transacting with.” Once I explained it that way, peoples’ eyes lit up.

    • The most common question I got asked was “okay, I got the zodl wallet, but now what? How do I actually get zcash?” I could have suggested an exchange like kraken, but these aren’t crypto folks. These are marginalized and vulnerable people who just need a way to safely get paid. What no one knew until I explained it, was that zcash isn’t just a cryptocurrency, it’s an entire software ecosystem that provides a workaround for censorship. Thanks to zodl’s swap and crosspay features, I was able to demonstrate how someone can receive zcash from a cashapp user sending USDC. This is crucial, because as sex workers we know all too well how hard it is to get our customers to even fully read our ads and follow our instructions, let alone adopt new ways of doing things.

    • But realizing that we don’t have to, is a game changer. Once people realized that they can get paid in zcash from the same clients who insist on still using cashapp, they were in. Showing people how to get a visa debit card through Kast that they can preload with zcash and use with apple pay or google wallet blew their minds. I’ve been an evangelist for signal private messenger since 2015, and the level of frustration and hopelessness I have felt trying to get people to care about their privacy cannot be exaggerated. But we are in a different era now, and people learn real fast when it affects their ability to eat and pay bills. And it gets better. I was shocked that onboarding people to zcash over the weekend became a gateway to get some people onboarded to signal private messenger, as well as using password managers like bitwarden and keepass as well.

    • The need for privacy has an urgency that it didn’t before, especially in this community. I make porn. I am an escort. I am trans. I am not a “crypto bro” or a “shill.” These things make me a credible messenger for an extremely necessary and powerful safety preserving tool that would otherwise be dismissed as “more crypto bullshit.” And all of these things would have been impossible to convey unless I had 10 minutes to stand there, face to face, in my stiletto pump heels and fishnets, looking out for them as one of them.” - Avery

**
ZECsy Veterans:** Justine returned to support the Zcash booth after supporting us during Berlin Blockchain week in June 2026. She demonstrated the CipherPay point of sales system by selling latex products at our booth. Kate Stapleton also returned to support this event, after supporting Amsterdam Cypherpunk Week in September 2026.

Interesting Conversations

  • Violet did an interview with Pink Rock Femme at the STDHero booth. She talked about Zcash and the importance of financial sovereignty for the adult entertainment industry. This video got 14k views on X, and more on BlueSky. See the full video at:

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  • Mylo connected with New Jersey Red Umbrella Alliance to talk about their struggles with de-banking and loosing CashApp. The organization has a traditional fiat bank account, and dispersed funds via sending first to the director’s CashApp and then direct mutual aide to unhoused populations and individuals via CashApp. CashApp has now banned the organization’s account, resulting in a complete lack of ability to distribute funds. They are seeking resources for alternative methods, and were deeply interested in what Zcash has to offer.

    • Mylo will follow up with the executive director after the conference.

  • A creator who is also a software developer was so immediately blown away by the Zcash team that she went home to start developing a clip site, with direct to consumer sales with ZEC. She aims to have a prototype in the next few weeks, that will take payments and unlock videos for the customers after ZEC payments are confirmed on-chain.

People we met before who we saw again:

  • People often need 3 touch points to convert. Violet and Mylo met a creator at a party hosted by one of our prior ZECsy apprentices in April 2025. Mylo then talked to this friend about Zcash in particular over Signal in August of 2026, but they weren’t ready to commit. This lovely human attended our booth in Oct 2026, and finally downloaded Zodl. She is now very interested in diving deeper through a workshop or extended conversations.

  • We also reconnected with many of the creators and vendors we met during Exxxotica Chicago.

Social Media: Zip-Zap
Mylo’s day 1 post showed the flyers on the booth table that included a small black cat, our ZECsy mascot lovingly named Zip-Zap the ZECsy cat. This post gained ~11.3k impressions, almost 10x my average post impressions. Many Twitter users zoomed in on this cat resulting in Zip-Zap going semi-viral. An X community was created including many memes as well as at least 6 tokens on Pump.Fun.

The X Community: $Zip-Zap - The Zecsy Cat Community / X

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A token was also launched by an unknown party for both Zip-Zap and ZECsy. We did not create this token!

As a result of Zip-Zap’s popularity, my second tweet about Exxxotica went viral.

Social Media: Dev Fund Debate

Mylo’s Day 2 post to twitter went pandemic-level viral with over 140k impressions, nearly 100x more impressions than previous posts. This post received 130 repost/quotes and ignited discussion over the funding practices of the Zcash Community Grants board.

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Disgustingly, many haters added transphobic and antisemitic comments. Some have even used it as moral grounds to advocate for abolishing the long-standing ecosystem funding streams intended to be used for Zcash adoption.

However, many supporters also voiced their support of the work included in this grant.

Supporters:

The debate sparked many essays and news coverage, including mention on CoinDesk:

Who was in the room

  • Who attends this event: +30,000 fans, creators and vendors

  • Who we reached: ~700 attendees

  • Prior Zcash awareness: We have a handful of booth visitors reveal they already held ZEC, as well as a 20-30 folks held other cryptocurrencies. Many vendors and creators visited our booth in Chicago, as we build relationships in this community. Several creators stopped by our booth precisely due to prior social media awareness or prior exposure at a previous event:

Developer Relations and Bridging Communities

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We did not have any technical issues with Zodl, or NEAR during this event. We were pleased to report 0 bugs during the conference weekend. **

What the room needed that does not exist yet:** I made a flyer for general users and also business who want to accept ZEC. This event showed me that non-profits have specific needs, such as crypto-accepting fiscal sponsors, and reporting requirements.

  • Mylo plans to create a flyer summary for non-profits to parallel the business flyers.

Lessons Learned

  • We learned that our flyers fit perfectly in the dental kits, so we will update the SWAG kits to always include this size flyer in the future.

  • We learned late in the event, that we could leave the emergency kits in the bathrooms so folks can find both Tide stain-remover in the bathrooms along with our info cards and fact sheets. We plan to leave kits in the bathrooms for future events.

  • We need a non-profit focused fact sheet.

Thank you to the Zcash community for your continued support. Onward, to Exxxotica Miami!

— @readymouse, @fabacab

Note: All reports can be found at ZECsy_Team_Reports - Google Drive

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