Hey Zcash community, I’m Matty from the Colosseum team.
We have been running Solana’s hackathons for the past 6 years (as an independent org for the past 2 years), and we have decided to open up our platform to builders across the crypto ecosystem.
We just announced our next startup competition (Crypto World’s Fair) today and plan to have a dedicated Zcash track. To help with funding the track and our ops, we have submitted a proposal to the ZCG committee.
For us, this is the beginning of a long-term effort to create a founder talent funnel for ecosystems we have conviction in. We believe the Zcash startup eco is in its earliest stages, and we can help accelerate its growth through our platform (as we have done for the Solana eco).
If you’re a founder considering integrating with Zcash or adding ZEC to your product, we hope you take the opportunity to join the competition. And we’d love to get feedback from the community as well!
I have a concern, notably, that’s Zcash’s Shielded pools are nowhere CLOSE to Turing complete, unlike Solana. You fundamentally can’t build anything on top that isn’t just send, receive. For transparent ZEC, well, tZEC is a fork of Bitcoin, so it shares its programming language (Bitcoin Script) verbatim.
How do you ensure participants don’t just download librustzcash, plug in Zcash instead of Bitcoin, rebrand, and call it a day? There is no innovative DeFi protocol that can be deployed on Zcash.
Yes understood. We don’t initially expect to see builders create products “on top” of the protocol like they do in Solana.
In this first competition, I would imagine most of the products will be utilizing ZEC the asset in some way. Which I think is still very beneficial in the short term to the community, and I think could actually find some PMF.
Hackathon over hackathon, and as Zcash develops as a project, I do though expect to see more complex integrations. Also, part of the beauty of these competitions is that builders experiment at the edges of what people think is possible.
If a bunch of builders do end up just creating a bunch of rebranded copypasta, that’s ok. The end goal is to attract a few really high quality founders, ones who can really push the ecosystem forward, and the ones who will end up with the awards from this grant.
As PR? Yes, I completely agree it would be beneficial. But is it free PR? The ZCG will be spending the quarter of a million dollars of community funds on it. Is it worth a quarter of a million dollars? I doubt it.
Doing WHAT? What in the ZEC ecosystem is worth founding right now? I should not be saying this, but the entire effort of ZODL (who you came here from), Shielded Labs, us, Valar Group, is to make Zcash faster, stronger and more open so that in the future we may get founders.
Right now, the only possible “products” we could see are platforms that merely swap to Zcash as their underlying payment method, which is a 6 line code change with advent of things like BTCPayServer Zcash support, which was also funded by the ZCG, for the exact reason of incentivising people to add it to their existing products seamlessly.
When we know that a majority of submissions will just be things that are either payment rail neutral or built for BTC/ETH with simple rebranding that would never actually be used as anything but a cash cow to win money from the Zcash track, that is not a very good investment, is it?
Anyways, this is only my opinion. The committee members’ opinion might obviously differ.
@mattytay at the most recent meeting, ZCG voted to approve this proposal (at the revised $150,000 amount). Congratulations!
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