### Terms and Conditions
- [x] I agree to the [Grant Agreement](https://9ba4718…c-5c73-47c3-a024-4fc4e5278803.usrfiles.com/ugd/9ba471_f81ef4e4b5f040038350270590eb2e42.pdf) terms if funded
- [x] I agree to [Provide KYC information](https://9ba4718c-5c73-47c3-a024-4fc4e5278803.usrfiles.com/ugd/9ba471_7d9e73d16b584a61bae92282b208efc4.pdf) if funded above $50,000 USD
- [x] I agree to disclose conflicts of interest
- [x] I agree to adhere to the [Code of Conduct](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcg-code-of-conduct/41787) and [Communication Guidelines](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcg-communication-guidelines/44284)
- [x] I agree to post request details on the [Community Forum](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/c/grants/33)
- [x] I understand it is my responsibility to post a link to this issue on the [Zcash Community Forums](https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/c/grants/33) after this application has been submitted so the community can give input. I understand this is required in order for ZCG to discuss and vote on this grant application.
### Application Owners (@Octocat, @Octocat1)
@ChristopherA, @shannona
### Organization Name
Blockchain Commons
### How did you learn about Zcash Community Grants
Long familiarity with the blockchain ecosystem, and also our previous grant work on the ZeWIF project, in conjunction with Zingo Labs.
### Requested Grant Amount (USD)
$60,000
### Category
Wallets
### Project Lead
```project-lead.yaml
Name: Christopher Allen
Role: Chief Architect
Background: Christopher Allen is the coauthor of the TLS and DID standards and is currently working with the IETF to advance dCBOR and the Envelope data format for standardization. Recognized as a “Top 100 Influencer in Identity,” he was Principal Architect at Blockstream, Vice President at Blackphone, and CTO of Certicom. Today, he is the Executive Director of Blockchain Commons. For this project, Christopher will coordinate between Blockchain Commons and the larger Zcash community to support and extend interop specs including ZeWIF.
Responsibilities: Oversee project, coordinate & provide technical vision
```
### Additional Team Members
```team-members.yaml
- Name: Wolf McNally
Role: Lead Researcher & Designer
Background: Wolf McNally is Blockchain Commons' lead researcher and engineer, who developed most of Blockchain Commons' specifications, such as Animated QRs, Uniform Resources (URs), Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction (SSKR), and Zcash extensible Wallet Interchange Format (ZeWIF) and also designed LifeHash and the upcoming Provenance Mark specification.
Responsibilities: Support ZeWIF, test PRs, merge PRs, work with ECC and other early adopters.
- Name: Shannon Appelcline
Role: Technical Writer
Background: Shannon Appelcline is an award-winning nonfiction author and technical writer who has written for numerous blockchain and DeFi companies and who has described most of Blockchain Commons' specifications.
Responsibilities: Support meetings, prepare presentations on interop, extend requested documents.
```
### Project Summary
Long-term support for the Zcash wallet developers community over the next twelve months, focused on continued ZeWIF development, but also expanding into other areas of support and into broader knowledge diffusion.
### Project Description
From January through April 2025, Blockchain Commons led the work on the Zcash extensible Wallet Interchange Format (ZeWIF) project. At the start of May, we delivered our draft of the zewif, zmigrate, and other repos, as well as associated documentation.
However, work has continued on the project. As we expected, there were needs for revisions and expansions as the format went into real use. We've been working primarily with ECC and Zingo Lab engineers to incorporate and test PRs and continue to advance the project. (We're also waiting for that work to settle enough to release formal crates as well as finalized documents.)
This grant request seeks to fund this continued support work for ZeWIF, which we expect will expand as wallet developers other than ECC and Zingo begin use of the format, and to simultaneously fund
meetings that we expect to support this and future interop work and to diffuse ZeWIF and more general Zcash knowledge.
### Proposed Problem
This work emerges out of the zcashd deprecation. We authored ZeWIF to support the deprecation of zcashd and to make it easy to exchange data between zcashd and other wallets. Our most important work was therefore with ECC, to enable interchange of wallet files from zcashd to Zashi. At the moment, ECC continues to offer the most extensive PRs for ZeWIF and we need to be able to support that to ensure the zcashd deprecation is a full success.
As part of the ZeWIF project, Zingo Labs developed the initial Zexcavator program, whose purpose is to help recover lost ZEC. It has been released in version 0.0.3, but ZeWIF-based wallet export is still minimal. As recovery of lost ZEC is another high priority, this is another place where we'd like to offer our support so that the project can reach its full potential.
Beyond that, to date ZeWIF integration has been limited to ECC and Zingo Labs, leading to various levels of integration with zcashd, Zashi, eZcash, Zecwallet, and Zingo. We surveyed other wallet formats before we began the design work on ZeWIF and we want to encourage them to now adopt ZeWIF and to be available for support when they do.
Work on the ZeWIF project also revealed issues with centralization of knowledge in the Zcash ecosystem. Our project helped in some diffusion of knowledge to engineers at Blockchain Commons and Zingo Labs, but more decentralization of knowledge is clearly necessary to improve the health of the ZeWIF developer community.
Meanwhile, Blockchain Commons has offered interop advances to the Bitcoin ecosystsem, including Animated QRs, Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction, Collaborative Seed Recovery, and Object Identity Blocks. We'd love to see these extended to the Zcash ecosystem. The first step in doing so is revealing the opportunities to wallet creators and finding critical mass for support of these systems. This could be accomplished in parallel with a more general system of knowledge diffusion that could also help the community as a whole.
### Proposed Solution
Blockchain Commons' solution to these issues is fairly simple: we want to offer one man-week of support a month for each of the next twelve months, from June 2025 to May 2026. This will allow us to work with developers, to integrate PRs, to resolve Issues, and to extend documentation for ZeWIF to give it the best opportunity for widespread usage and adoption.
As ZeWIF settles, it will also give us additional time to collaborate with the ZeWIF community and to generally support the diffusion of knowledge in the community. This would include discussion and/or demoing of other possible interchange specifications created by Blockchain Commons, that are available for their use. This will in large part be done through meetings, which we intend to reach out to a good cross-section of Zcash developers.
This grant does _not_ include the development of additional specifications for Zcash. If there's sufficient interest in any specification or advancement beyond ZeWIF itself we'd expect to propose that as a partnered grant proposal in the future. But this grant as it stands focuses on: support for ZeWIF development and meetings to help diffuse knowledge about Zcash, ZeWIF, and other interop opportunities.
### Solution Format
The support of ZeWIF would be seen primarily through the deliverable of GitHub and Crates.io releases. We will be able to test PRs, incorporate them, respond to Issues, and resolve them. As testing and merging occurs, these updates will be released both in source code form through GitHub and in crates and API docs form through crates.io. Obviously, the exact flow of these updates will depend on the needs and submissions of the community.
There might be additional documents written like the attachments and best practices guide that were part of the original ZeWIF project. If these occur, they will be based on the needs and requests of the community. If they are requested, they'll most likely appear in the ZeWIF Github repo.
Interactions with the community will happen casually through Signal channels or Zcash Community forums and more formally through meetings. These meetings will be held approximately bimonthly. The milestones list (below) has them every second month, but that might not be the precise tempo, as meetings are often affected by external conventions and meetups and by holidays. But there definitely will be at least six over the course of the 12-month period. These meetings will be focused on supporting wallet developers. Topics are expected to include:
* Using ZeWIF
* Using ZF FROST
* Using Other Blockchain Commons Specifications
* Sharing Other Zcash Knowledge
Each meeting will also be fully documented as we did with the four public meetings we've held to date to support ZeWIF (https://developer.blockchaincommons.com/chains/zcash/zewif/#meetings), so that future developers can return to them.
Though this grant request is designed as a 12-month support grant focused on ZeWIF, it's laid out with monthly milestones, both so that we can make regular reports to the community on status, and so that we can bring the project to an end after a lesser number of months if it no longer seems to be serving its purpose and/or if its goals have already been met.
### Dependencies
We need people to work with us!
We already have strong connections to ECC and Zingo Labs. Other members of the Zcash community have shown up at various meetings we've had. But, to receive the best results, we need these links to expand, and also for more developers to buy into the expansions implicit in ZeWIF and other specifications.
(Obviously, we'll be working hard to build these connections ourselves, as this is one of the major purposes of the regular meetings, but it ultimately remains a dependency.)
### Technical Approach
The technical decisions were largely made in the development phase of ZeWIF.
For this support phase, we expect one of two approaches to occur:
1. Contributor offers a PR for ZeWIF.
2. If necessary, we consult with community on its viability.
3. We test PR.
4. We release updates to repo & crates.
Or:
1. Contributors offers an Issue on ZeWIF.
2. We consult with community on Issue.
3. We update ZeWIF with our own PR or work with community to create one.
4. We test PR.
5. We release updates to repo & crates.
At meetings, we expect to offer demos and presentations and/or to host discussions and presentations from other members. There could also be technical discussion of extant Zcash elements as we diffuse existing knowledge at the meetings.
Any actual technical work beyond ZeWIF updates would be another project.
### Upstream Merge Opportunities
We do not expect any additional links to upstream Zcash repos other than what's already incorporated into ZeWIF.
### Hardware/Software Costs (USD)
$0
### Hardware/Software Justification
N/A
### Service Costs (USD)
$0
### Service Costs Justification
N/A
### Compensation Costs (USD)
$60,000
### Compensation Costs Justification
This project is laid out at $5,000 a month, which would be 5 technical-writer days at $125/hr or 4+ lead engineer days at $150/hr. We expect to contribute a man-week to the project each month as some combination of these contributions.
### Total Budget (USD)
$60,000
### Previous Funding
Yes
### Previous Funding Details
The original work on ZeWIF was supported by grant #3, for $149,600 in its revised form, which funded the initial releases of ZeWIF from Blockchain Commons and Zexcavator from Zingo Labs. Additional support we've provided since the grant ended at the end of April has been from private funds.
### Other Funding Sources
No
### Other Funding Sources Details
_No response_
### Implementation Risks
The biggest risk continues to be adoption. We were fortunate to be able to work with both ECC and Zingo Labs, and we expect those partnerships to continue and to be a source of additional modifications and requests for the ZeWIF repos.
But we need adoption from other wallet designers to really take the next step, and have ZeWIF be something more than just the tool that helped support the zcashd deprecation. We hope to enable and encourage that additional interest and adoption through our meetings, so that's our current plan to address this risk.
### Potential Side Effects
As we said in our previous grant request: standardization implicitly creates limits. The open community approach that we used when developing ZeWIF and that we will continue to expand over this support period is meant to address that, as was the "extensible" nature of ZeWIF itself. Nonetheless, this remains a threat that we should always be aware of.
### Success Metrics
Our first success metric will be if our current partners at ECC and Zingo Labs reach the point where they're satisfied with ZeWIF as it exists and their PRs and Issues trail off. This clearly needs to be linked to full adoption in the zcashd-Zashi interchange pipeline and full integration with Zexcavator, as that will demonstrate that ZeWIF has been adopted, not abandoned.
More widely, our success metric will be in how many wallets have adopted ZeWIF. We said in our previous proposal that we expected to make a full report-out a year after the zcashd deprecation, which would be next April. That would fall toward the end of this support period, and our intent is that the support period itself will increase the number of adoptions beyond what the mere release of ZeWIF allows.
### Startup Funding (USD)
$0
### Startup Funding Justification
N/A.
### Milestone Details
```milestones.yaml
- Milestone: 1
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-06-30
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF support to date, release of current repos.
- Milestone: 2
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-07-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF support to date, release of current repos, report on first meeting (meeting reports might end up earlier or later for this and later milestones, depending on scheduling, but should run on average at least every other month).
- Milestone: 3
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-08-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & crates.
- Milestone: 4
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-09-30
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & creates, report on second meeting.
- Milestone: 5
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-10-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & crates.
- Milestone: 6
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-11-30
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & creates, report on third meeting.
- Milestone: 7
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2025-12-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & crates.
- Milestone: 8
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2026-01-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & creates, report on fourth meeting.
- Milestone: 9
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2022-02-28
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & crates.
- Milestone: 10
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2026-03-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & creates, report on fifth meeting.
- Milestone: 11
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2022-04-30
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & crates.
- Milestone: 12
Amount (USD): 5,000
Expected Completion Date: 2026-05-31
Deliverables: Report on ZeWIF & other support to date, release of current repos & creates, report on sixth meeting.
```
### Supporting Documents
```files.yaml
- File Name 1: Brief description of the file contents
- File Name 2: Brief description of the file contents
```