The last two weeks have been… weird. But in a good way.
Given the dramatically increased financial and talent resources that are now more available to all 4 orgs (ECC, ZF, SL, ZCG), should we re-look at our separate strategies and collective mission?
How do we welcome new contributors and community members? How do we best harness their energy?
How do we keep momentum going, long after the attention recedes?
Curious about ideas from the community in general too!
Thank you for posting this, @ml_sudo! I wanted to share a few observations from the past couple of weeks:
I’ve seen @andrea and @decentralistdan from ECC providing outstanding Zashi support across multiple platforms.
I’ve seen @Autotunafish, @zerodartz, @dismad, @squirrel, @pacu and many other community members respond to dozens of Discord messages — welcoming newcomers, offering tech support, and keeping discussions on track while fending off spam and off-topic chatter. The same goes for @gottabeJay on Telegram and @Shawn here on the Forum.
I’ve seen @ZCG (via @FPF) field more grant requests in the past three days than they sometimes receive in an entire month — and still manage to give each request the time, attention, and respect it deserves.
I’ve seen ZCG grantees pushing hard to deliver on their milestones, raising thoughtful questions, and collaborating closely across the ecosystem.
I’ve seen @ZecHub community members participate in a successful hackathon while continuing to provide awesome educational and technical resources.
I’ve seen staff from ZF, ECC, and SL, along with community members like @frankbraun, representing Zcash in person at multiple conferences around the world.
Across the board, the three major organizations are working together — at both leadership and engineering levels — to clarify roles, coordinate resources, and maintain focus on our shared ecosystem goals, all while working on our own projects to move Zcash forward. We’re aligned, and our collective engineering momentum is excellent.
The Zcash community as a whole has stepped up, answering questions, sharing ideas, and engaging in constructive discussions across all platforms. This kind of community engagement isn’t new for Zcash, but the sheer volume and energy lately truly deserve recognition.
We still have plenty of work ahead, and we’ll undoubtedly face new and complex challenges. But I have real faith that we’ve built the collaborative foundation we need to succeed together.
To the entire Zcash community: keep asking questions, keep sharing ideas, and keep building connections that make us stronger, more resilient, and ready for whatever challenges and opportunities come next!
As I’ve said many times we are ATH in collaboration!
I also dare to say that ZingoLabs, although modest in resources, is becoming a Zcash major Org as well. And we have @ZecHub which is a Zcash Major DAO!
And we shouldn’t leave aside QEDIT.
We are at a crossroad in terms of head count. We need more people, but also everyone is at their 100% capacity so onboarding new members is going to take a toll to overall velocity.
I might be wrong but if feel that ZEC price action took off when several efforts were combined into the mix:
Zcash leaders having a prominent role high profile at conferences with other industry leaders worldwide and being active instead of staying with the “build and they’ll come” strategy.
Delivered things to do with your ZEC! (In a very nice top Tier End-User application)
Give up “reinventing wheels because Zcash is so special” mentality and embracing “Meeting people where they are at” by connecting ZEC to DeFi through NEAR, Maya and Thorchain DEXs and investing in closing the technological gaps so we could blend in and integrate.
Focusing on the right problems of the moment: we tackled privacy since day one, but scalability is invariably fundamental to crypto’s L1s future that no one seemed to have a very good answer for and tachyon’s announcement had tremendous impact.
Making Zcash FUN Again by decreasing drama. Nobody wants to invest in a war zone (except you are a warfare manufacturer)
Improvements and momentum building:
Tooling: Zcash developers are Survivors! we need normie devs. Lower survivor bias by improving our Developer Experience (DX)
Educational resources built on top of the tooling
People: Ethereum and Solana are very vibrant communities not only because they are probably more extroverted than the average privacy geek, they are A LOT of people.
Tapping into the AI wave and turn it into our benefit: AI is the new IDE, but it sucks at telling you how to achieve stuff with Zcash.
Preparing the ground for ZSAs so when launched people have good resources to build on top of them (see @earthrise ZSA UX challenge)
Combining all the points above so more people can build stuff around Zcash and expand ZEC’s value proposition with more cool things like:
payment integrations and solutions for merchants and entrepreneurs
Expanding support for more hardware wallets like KeepKey following the successful Keystone strategy.
Low-tech High-Life Zodling solutions for undeveloped nations.
One thing I’d love to see is a good pipeline for converting developers with a casual interest in Zcash into full-time Zcash builders. This means having amazing documentation, libraries, and infrastructure that makes it possible to build cool things on top of Zcash in just a few minutes or a few hours. The impact of ZSAs will be massively amplified if building them is a great experience, hence my ZSA usability challenge.
When a prospective developer is interested in building on Zcash, the more frustrating confusions, long sync times, or complicated protocol details that they have to wade through to get their thing working, the less likely they are to they succeed and stay in our community. So I think this is really important, and it will take a lot of collaboration to do right, since developer-usability considerations should bubble up from documentation, library design, to the protocol design itself, and public infrastructure for developers to use is important too. We also need to consider the usability experience of developers as we make backwards-incompatible changes to the core protocol.
Zashi and the Keystone integration have made Zcash so much more usable for end-users and we’re about to accelerate Zcash core development by deprecating zcashd. If we can attract developers to build their own (hopefully profitable!) products on top of Zcash too, that has the potential to bring in whole new audiences of prospective end-users to keep the surge flowing.
(These are my personal opinions, not with my ZF board member hat on.)
I agree with many of the Improvements and momentum building suggestions but commercially available nodes are a fundamental pilar in building a decentralized community. This business is an opportunity for our community and connects long-term zodlers.