Hey everyone — I’m putting in a Zcash Community Grants application for something I’ve been calling ZKPay Campus, and wanted to share it here for feedback before it goes to committee review.
The short version: Zcash’s privacy tech is genuinely strong, but almost nobody actually spends with it day to day — it mostly just sits on exchanges. Meanwhile, at universities here in Kenya, students are sending each other money constantly — splitting rent, paying for food, covering small services — and all of that runs through mobile money systems like M-Pesa, which work fine but have zero privacy built in. Anyone with platform-level access can see what you’re spending and on what.
So the idea is pretty simple: a wallet where you scan a QR code to pay someone, just like you’d use mobile money, except every payment underneath is a shielded Zcash transaction by default. No addresses to understand, no privacy setting to dig for — it’s just how the app works.
The one part of this I’m not glossing over: campus internet isn’t reliable, so the app needs to let people sign a transaction offline and have it go through once they’re back online. The tricky bit there is that if the chain moves forward before that transaction broadcasts, the cryptographic proof tied to it can go stale and need re-signing. That’s the hardest engineering problem in the whole project, so I’ve put it early in the build schedule rather than leaving it for last.