Thanks for the intro @zooko!
Hello everyone, I wanted to pop in and share a little about me and our team.
I’ve been in the space for a while, launching Fold in 2014. I first came across Zcash mining with friends in 2016. Since then, I’ve kept close tabs on the tech.
In 2017, we began working on Keep, a privacy project with applications to cross-chain interop, primarily focused on Ethereum. While we’ve lately been heads down on building a Bitcoin / Ethereum bridge some of you might also recognize me from Split, where James Prestwich and I presented on bridging Zcash and Ethereum.
As a company we’re very interested in devoting more resources to Zcash development, but the current fund structure and governance process have been discouraging. In particular, the incentive for a team like ours to join in development without an obvious source of funding or ramp-up is a problem. The foundation’s grant system is interesting, but grants are a difficult mechanism in an ecosystem with a steep learning curve, especially for established teams of builders- we need to be able to budget and work by quarter to ship significant work on the scale of teams like the ECC or Parity.
I’ve been watching the governance debate a bit from the sidelines, and think we have a perspective that might be interesting to the community- a team of outside developers that would like to work on Zcash. I’m digging through proposals right now to better educate myself on the state of play, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on how to bootstrap new developers in the space!