yo! Thank you for the public feedback here, it is amazing to see you already preparing for integration of this feature within your personal project.
Will use this response to provide some clarity on the vision and intention:
ZCASH CHAIN INTEGRATION
I do not see this VM being upstreaming into the ZCash L1 chain directly, as some private feedback ive received has made it clear that this is transparently not where the holders are trying to go, given ZSA, which have far more limited functionality is under massive contention right now.
This would much more fit suite into a format compatible with the zcash ecosystem similar to the TZE proposal for integration with Starknet, as a programmable L2 settlement system.
We would be able to unlock and explore integration even with the upcoming crosslink integration, which is the consensus layer derived from Tendermint (CometBFT). I think this best suites ZCash ecosystem because Cosmwasm has tested and stable integration with chains using CometBFT, such ass access light client information from chain state, IBC packet lifecycles, and things like staking data coming from the consensus layer, giving the Zcash community a headstart on the tooling available for permissionless building of application logic interfacing with crosslink, without rebuilding from scratch.
Secret Network scares me as they rely solely on TEE attestation for securing the privacy of the app-state, which seams like in a post-quantum world this data aggregated from full nodes can be retroactively broken (though this is pure paranoia and not based on any of my quantitative experience).
There are a handful of chains compatible with cosmwasm that would directly benefit a world where Zcash L2’s have native support with a zk-flavored cosmwasm VM, such as ThorChain, Fairblock, and others that are not on the top of my head (though I have not done my due diligence for these projects either).