I have heard there’s some concern being expressed that the @ZCG is not as transparent, or fair, as it could be.
I’m posting this, for the reference of people who want to learn about how the Zingo Labs Zaino Grant, and the BCC/ZL Joint ZeWIF Grant were funded.
The Zaino Grant
I’ve been interested in extending the test capabilities of Zebra since Zingo Labs first forked zecwallet-lite in the hectic weeks immediately before the release of NU5. At the second Z|ECC summit in San Diego, which I paid to attend using my dwindling savings (all ZEC, of course), I spoke with @joshs and @aquietinvestor about work I could help with that would be most beneficial to the Zcash community.
The immediate result of those conversations was that Zingo Labs put together a grant proposal to try to build on the unpaid months of development work that we’d already committed to regtest mode in zebra, and a Rust alternative to lightwalletd.
As you might expect given my privileged access to the @ZCG decision makers, our past history of successful grant completion, and the significant up-front investment we had already sunk, combined with the compelling case we were making for decentralizing core engineering work into a new team, our proposal was immediately…
rejected.
So we went back to the drawing board with feedback from @ElectricCoinCo and @ZcashFoundation engineers, we revised and updated our proposal, carefully targeted the most critical demands deprecation of Zcashd required… and then we submitted our new proposal and as you might expect we…
were rejected again.
Finally after addressing remaining concerns and lowering our ask, we received a majority vote from the @ZCG. This was timely as we’d burned through a significant chunk of our treasury building our POC zaino.
The ZeWIF Grant
The Block Chain Commons is composed of leading researchers and cryptographers, including @ChristopherA, who have contributed significantly to the architecture of the internet, and especially to those components needed to provide the level of security web 2.0 offers via TLS.
Riding on those laurels, and with extensive and widely respected experience in the specialized domains of Block Chain Layer-0 secret management, and protocol standardization, the BCC proposed to the @ZCG that they could help with Z^3, Zcash 2025 critical wallet specification work.
As you would expect, their proposal was:
rejected
They returned the drawing board, partnered with Zingo Labs because we’re a Zcash wallet development shop. And reapplied…
Soo… if you’re thinking of applying for @ZCG grants… and you suspect that there’s an unfair advantage granted to those with longer experience, and better relationships… maybe reconsider the facts. If your grant didn’t make it the first time, maybe take the feedback, incorporate it, and try again!
That worked for us… eventually.
Now I am flush with Zcash, and that’s enabled me to have my analog of the pump-and-dump shitcoin Lambos, the zingoista Lambo:
Or… maybe I just have different values that ensure that I invest my energy in making Zcash better. 