in our case the court is the market. i think we are talking about two different things. i am saying our marketing should be more direct.
you and i both agree (it sounds). zec value is highly unstable. it’s very risky to buy zec and use it for spending because it won’t retain its value. my point is to market it based on its qualities as a commodity and scarce asset. and then add stablecoins to reach the average person who wants privacey.
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Well, it was not supposed to be risky to buy ZEC. I think the drop in value reflects the loss of confidence from the investors. IMO, there is not much to look forward to. POS doesn’t change the nature of the coin or offer any additional usage scenarios. I am interested in programmability but it seems that the core team has other priorities.
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You aren’t asking me, but I’ll go:
The money spent on hiring Zcash media to tell a story that doesn’t exist.
That could have been spent literally on paid advertising. Maybe sponsoring Cobie’s podcast (as FTX did), or actually collaborating (paid collaboration is also a thing), with the broader crypto community.
I can’t think of one fruitful effort that spawned from the ECC marketing department. Let’s not even mention the NFT blunder.
The list goes on and on. The bottom line is the board needs removal, there needs to be a cleanse in who controls this project (hint: it needs to be way more community driven), and once Qedit is done with their initial ZSA implementation, developers need to be recruited.
I am interested in programmability but it seems that the core team has other priorities.
You are one of the few in the community that actually knows how to build on Zcash currently, and is interested. It seems that interest wanes for many other developers after being continually let down by the powers that be.
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I don’t think it would have had a positive long-term impact. IMO, we should have quickly pushed a fee increase to curb the spam asap. At least, it showed that Zcash isn’t ready for mainstream adoption.
Or because there is no programmability. To make any improvement requires changes to the protocol.
ZSAs are an example of that. ERC-20 are a few hundred lines of easy-to-understand solidity.
In Zcash, there is a team of cryptographers working on it for more than a year already.
It’s like you have to code everything in binary vs python.
To be fair, private smart contracts are extremely hard. No one has achieved the level of privacy that the Zcash team would accept (IMO).
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You’re most likely right, but my point was more about we would at least get some more value vs. (both of) the Zcash media grant(s).
I also agree with this. I think I’ve mentioned this same point before, but it makes total sense to be reminded of it. I was also considering in my comment the ones that have left Zcash Foundation/ECC for greener (or maybe not in the case of BlueSky) pastures.
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PoS will enable ZEC holders to earn interest on their ZEC. I’d say that alone is a pretty valuable use case for ZEC holders. It will also bring finality to Zcash which will make bridging efforts easier.
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Here is Z.Cash
Statements calling Zcash “cash for the new age” or “simple, secure digital currency that protects your privacy”
They’re plain and simple wrong and misleading
Every person that has been convinced that Zcash is Cash has been injured 
Zcash deserves better than this.
Zcash could be great if the leadership has a change of heart and stops with the stubborn and misleading marketing campaigns
This isn’t scalable, and its certainly not practical. In essentially all nations, the speculative trading in and out of crypto assets creates a taxable event. It is totally impractical for people to be recommended to generate a new tax event each time they purchase a cup of coffee.
And P.S. the Zcash Media team is soaking up another $1,000,000 from the ecosystem, but haven’t even delivered a tweet or a 30 second YouTube Short this entire calendar year!
100% Holding ZEC is a strenuous action, and it should be compensated
All of the talk about what ZEC is or isn’t… visit the website. https://z.cash/
“A simple, secure digital currency that protects your privacy. For everyday purchases, sending money to a friend, and your favorite crypto applications, too.”
If this isn’t accurate or what the community wants it to be, then something is clearly misaligned.
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It’s the FIAT alternative part that I am debating. It’s not advertised as that.
Again, I dislike the crash of the market price but the price stability is not part of the promise. If it was, then when the price was going up, it should also be an issue.
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Like PKR mentioned. No it is not explicitly marketed as a “fiat alternative” but all of the implications are certainly leading to the conclusion.
“Zcash is an optionally private, ZKP enabled alternative to Bitcoin”
it isn’t simple, but I would argue that it is accurate.
I’d say it is marketed as a cash alternative, i.e. supporting private micro transactions with low fees.
But that’s not the case. And I think that’s why the price tanked. I suppose the difference is in what came first.
Me: Project didn’t deliver => price tanked.
Other: price tanked => project didn’t deliver.
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Yes, I believe we all seem to agree with that logic.
I will add a nuance (which also suggests project team derived problems)
The market is a forward looking pricing mechanism. This leads me to assert that the market is punishing Zcash in equal parts of is past; for its poor use of funding, poor track record of product deliveries, poor adherence to scheduling/ timely delivery, poor advisory activities, but also of its future for holding poor visions of the future for the delivery of what, when, why, by whom, et al
The value (badly deteriorated) of Zcash today is in large parts determined by the current vision for the project as described by the ECC/ ZCG/ ZF.
We should also pay our respects to Bitcoin. If the units of BTC were valued down near $20,000 rather than up near $40,000, I could guarantee you that Zcash would be valued another 50% lower today. As they say, the rising tide (BTC) lifts all boats.
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It’s a very dramatic topic. But in Zcash either there is a conspiracy theory and everything will be fine, and we are just given puzzles to keep us interested. Or there is no conspiracy theory and everything is fucked up and everyone who is annoyed should have left the project a long time ago. But nothing has changed here for all the time I’ve been on the forum. Just continuing to enjoy the turmoil.
PS I used to worry a lot too, that some decisions were definitely not going to succeed. But after a few years I came to the same conclusion every time - everything was done very well every time. Maybe I’m a blinded fan of the project, but I see that we are moving towards success and nothing that has been done is in vain.
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I’ll respond to this tonight. Pretty in-depth.
Tl;dr - marketing has been a failure, but I think people are missing a lot of relevant context. I agree with about 70% of what I see in this forum.
I worked at ECC so take anything I say with a grain of salt.
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Hey everyone,
I’m responding to this thread because I’ve seen various commentary on marketing, education and other related topics. Because I worked at the ECC and have contributed to other Zcash initiatives around these items, I felt the need to respond. A lot of you might disagree with me, which is fine.
First off, I agree with the sentiment that Zcash marketing has failed. I agree with the sentiment that Zcash education isn’t going to drive normal people to use Zcash. I agree that it won’t attract crypto natives to the platform. Regarding education, that does not, however, mean it’s not important.
I want to discuss a few things here. I’m writing this on a flight home, so it might be a bit scattered. Also, this post is not technically correct, because crypto marketing is largely bullshit and everyone stretches the truth to feel good about their own convictions. I’m not even going to fact check anything, because people who read crypto twitter won’t. Purely vibes this post.
First, narratives:
Some narratives aren’t going to be fixed by marketing campaigns. The Zcash narrative is inherently damaged by past items that continue to plague the project. The current drama isn’t helping matters BY THE WAY.
Let’s look at a few of these narratives. First, the dev fund. The dev fund, in the broader ecosystem, is seen as a major weakness to this project. I don’t actually think this is from other developers in the cryptocurrency space, more rather people who shape narratives in this space. Most devs I talk to are like “Zcash dev fund equals more ZK research and development, and that is good” because, to the team’s credits, they have open-sourced nearly all code related to Zcash which has gone on to benefit the space greatly.
But, has anyone ever said “man, I’m glad the dev fund exists because of a marketing campaign” even when the dev fund produced one of last years killer campaigns “privacy is normal”! No, because the dev fund is either associated with rich get richer schemes or forwarding ZK development. Nothing else.
And, it largely isn’t associated with growing an alternative currency that helps people exit the fiat system. When you think of that, you think Bitcoin and Monero. Sorry for saying that. I don’t make the rules!
But Zcash has better privacy and is a better option for alternative currency? We seem to think so, but guess what, no one cares! Why? Because it doesn’t help their bags, or they think you’re being dishonest. There’s no in between!
Some narratives I’ve heard (in-person) around dev fund in the last few months:
- “Dev fund is just to make zcash leadership rich”,
- “Dev fund is great to advance ZK development, but nothing else”
- “Zcash is the biggest failure in crypto because all of the money its received via dev fund, and produced nothing for holders”
- “Why does everyone in Zcash feel that they deserve to be paid? There’s no grassroots efforts just because people like Zcash”
I have not heard one positive, external opinion on how the Dev Fund benefits ZEC holders. I’ve only ever heard nice stuff around ZK development, and bad stuff.
Second is narrative around tech upgrades. Let’s look at NU5.
NU5 is largely known for removing trust set up in Zcash. This is really cool and amazing! But, did it have any impact on Zcash usage? Well, because the narrative is that a spam attack happened and killed the entire network, everyone thinks that NU5 caused the spam attack? Did it? Who cares! That’s what people think. Some narratives I’ve heard around NU5 (in-person) in the last few months:
- “Removing trusted set up rugged all zcash users because it enabled spam attack”
- “Zcash removed its trusted set up? Had no idea”
Third is a narrative around financial gain / rewards. Zcash price performance is quite poor. Zodlers are special because they are immune to pain. I love you, even though I think zodling is silly (spending ftw).
People look at Zcash as a payments platform where the only people making money are the people taking block rewards. There’s no future financial gain in using Zcash. There’s no way to shitcoin on Zcash, and Zcash is disconnected from the shitcoin casinos.
So since Zcash is on an island, and far away from the shitcoins, there’s no way for people to use it! People think there’s no point in holding it because it has zero value and there’s nothing to use it for! But payments?!?! Some narratives I’ve heard around crypto payments (kinda like Zcash) in-person over the last few months:
- “Why would I use crypto to buy stuff and miss out on gains bro?”
- “You use crypto for payments? Idiot”
- “Payments are a 2013 use case, no one cares about them anymore”
Some about Zcash being on an island that I’ve heard in-person:
- “Why would I use Zcash? It’s not a part of the shitcoin casino”
- “Why would I use ZSAs when I can use Railgun?”
- “Zcash is cool tech but you can’t do anything with it”
- “Why would I use Zcash as a private currency when 90% of transactions are public?” > This one’s right!
Do I hold any of these opinions? It doesn’t matter. That’s what other ecosystems think.
Now marketing
First thing is looking at this weird disdain for crypto twitter I see sometimes. “We can do things outside of twitter”. Lol, a guy yeeted a tweet about fake Bitcoin ETF news and moved market 10% in both directions 
Come on. Crypto lives on twitter. It might change! But not right now.
But there is Zcash twitter! Yeah, but it’s not driving diverse discussion points and debate around the future of the protocol. It’s all too positive. It seems fake. Listen to the market and the narratives surrounding Zcash. No amount of tweeting about future price predictions or “yay privacy” is going to change the narratives on Zcash. Also, we need to quit hoping for some black swan event where a bunch of Bitcoin users get killed, robbed, or rugged by the feds as a Zcash marketing strategy. I’ve learned that fear is a shitty strategy.
Okay, I’m bitching. Sorry, let’s focus on the actual “Zcash marketing” now.
No matter what strategy you implement for Zcash marketing, it will always be trumped by the narratives above. No amount of marketing is going to change public opinion around Zcash, because either 1) the narratives are true or 2) it’s an opinion where multiple things are true.
So what do you do? Because if nothing on Twitter will change public opinion? What will?
My friends, we’re forgetting about something. None of us know what Zcash’s future plans are! It’s an impossible job to market it! I’ll say it outright, any strategy to “market” the current form of Zcash, the Zcash that is bogged down by the various narratives that you may agree with or not, will not succeed.
“Ian, surely the new developments around Zcash are exciting and are worth talking about! You’re wrong!”
Sure, they might be exciting! But, how do they contribute to the narrative? What is the vision? What is the narrative that people who do not hold Zcash, or are fed up with the current of the project and have left, can be drawn towards? I don’t know. I don’t think any of us do, truthfully. But, I have ideas, and so do a lot of other people 
What if we went outside of our bubble and considered different technological approaches that’d drive more developer interest to Zcash, more crypto native excitement, and more actual usage of the protocol? Things past initial PoS research, ZSAs, etc.? Something a bit more radical?
How could we align our ecosystem with others and be more collaborative, instead of just sitting on our own island and talking about the same. thing. every. week…?
What if we started going into other crypto ecosystems, and started hosting open conversations about the future of Zcash and how it can support their ecosystem? Better yet, what if we created an aligned product roadmap with other industry players that got the industry excited about Zcash? How can we collaboratively discuss with the ecosystem how a private payment system fits in? Does the ecosystem need Zcash to be a private payments system that interoperates with other systems? Does it need to be a privacy platform? What do other friendly projects want to see from us? Who do we need to align with in the ecosystem?
Why do we think that if we suddenly enable programmability and ZSAs that we’ll all of a sudden drive value to Zcash? When competitors are getting to mainnet and they can interoperate with other systems and have access to more liquidity directly?
If we’re having these conversations critically assessing the future of Zcash, then why do so few of us, outside of the main Zcash bubble, know about it?
We need to stop talking about marketing. There’s nothing to market right now.
I’d say that two organizations leading development of the protocol need to work together to create a legitimate roadmap, but I feel like we’ve done this before. I don’t know if I’d believe a new proposed roadmap…
Ugh, man. I don’t know. I started writing this post hoping to recommend a call to action, I just don’t feel there is any. The market is obviously telling us to do something different, and we just keep banging on about the same thing.
There needs to be a vision. Something for people to latch on to. Even if that comes from projects coming out and directly competing against the vision that ECC and/or ZF hold.
Re my previous statements and support marketing projects, I should’ve been more critical.
Re my previous efforts on Zcash marketing, I’m sorry that I fell short in some of the community’s eyes. I did give it a decent go.
Last points. Everyone has my number of Signal or can DM me on Twitter. Just call me and we can hash this stuff out. Also, I’m happy to co-moderate any discussions between ECC and ZF around NU5 retro.
Disregard my thoughts and the sentiment of the trolls here as FUD? Most people in this space have views related to the FUD points listed above.
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts @januszgrze
Some good points in there, and similar frustrations that I think portray a large percentage of current people following this project.
This sums up Zcash perfectly. It’s like a person who is stuck in quicksand but you can’t help them because you, too, will perish.
Change always comes from the top. The people who control this project need to have more experience in the traditional tech industry building and shipping products (and actually delivering on the hype and not pushing goal posts/timelines out). As a professor coin, the marketing is always going to be an after-thought.
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It seems to me that the majority fails to take into account how market mechanisms work. That price is always supply and demand. We can’t count on growth like shitcoin, because shitcoin has no supply in the market from the beginning and is concentrated in the hands of a narrow group of people = scammers who project the growth of this shitcoin in ways that are far from market. ZEC can’t afford such luxury as pumping without any significant informational occasion that can trigger a price rise. But for me personally, a current price is not an indicator of the success of a project. I believe that Zcash in current conditions is much more successful than bitcoin with its growth on the rumors of a hundred thousand fortune-tellers without any facts. By the way, nobody is going to use bitcoin for payments at all.
Look, I recorded a video on my YouTube channel in Russian, where I started with the fact that supply and demand affects the price. That the supply of ZEC will decrease due to halving and PoS, and explained how each next update can affect demand. All tech bridges and ZSAs affect demand because we have an increase in the number of use cases. And then it works the same way as @joshs pointed out earlier when he wrote about the network utility factor. It’s all going to affect demand. So simple marketing for smart people. I didn’t lie about anything in this video, but every one out of eight people who watched it liked it and it got a lot of appreciation. So we have a way to combine our technical research with marketing. And we are mostly listened to by smart heads who don’t need to be told what a Zcash node is. What is a wallet, how to enable shielding - all this is for schoolboys in the world of crypto, and we have an audience that can easily teach themselves how to set up the node. They just don’t see the benefit of it now because it doesn’t make money. And at the same time, complex information about zero-knowledge proofs and all that stuff - on the contrary, it doesn’t get into the souls of those who want to make money investing in cryptocurrencies. You know? A huge part of the narrative and education is missing the point. But you just have to explain on your fingers why the next upgrade can lead to a price increase, and people thank you and forward your video themselves. Let’s just stop being nerds and reduce the level of pessimism. Yes, the fact is that people in crypto want money, lots of money and preferably faster. That’s the truth. So we should focus on that aspect. And without the scientific snobbery, like we don’t care about any of that. I still don’t understand how this could have been said at ZCON. A hundred thousand people left Zcash at once, and now we are thinking how to get them back.
Zcash is now in such a state and with such a low capitalization base that even a pinch of marketing, a single successful video can accelerate it to ATH after halving. Next thing you know, it will be gaining enormous popularity thanks to all the scientific nerdiness that looks useless today. But after 2025, we will all witness how Zcash and its incredible cypherpunk aura of proper cryptocurrencies in the cryptoworld will be broadcast from every tire.
Trust me! I’m ok.
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Thanks @januszgrze for your comments, its a shame that we get this sort of freedom of view point only after the talent has walked out the door, and you’re not the only example
The number 1 issue I see with zcash as a project is it is poor and has to survive on lean pickings of the dev fund, and after the halving next year it will be even worse!
A project with VC support on ethereum can create a 4,000,000,000 token supply and dwarf the combined budgets of ECC ZF and the ZGC.
If ZEC was $1000 and ECC had a billion dollars in the coffers noone would care where Zooko bought his groceries from… but I digress
So what can be done right now? Imo We need to spend the ZGC treasury to make money!
Since the spam attacks have been vanquished the zcash blockchain works really well for transactions and messaging, surely a suite of apps can be built around that which also rakes a fee in the transaction? There are lots of things people need privacy for right NOW which zcash can be applied to (password managers, private messaging app like session, decentralised file hosting?) Im sure there are better ideas than mine out there but you get the point.
ECC gets to remain not for profit and focus on protocol upgrades and ZCG can build another revenue stream.
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Technically, the spam has not been vanquished. It has been made too expensive. But if there are more “organic” transactions, it will get bad again.
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This also goes without saying, the Spam will never be vanquished. It is forever baked into the blockchain/ every node today/ every node of the future.
Sure 250GB of Spam may be trivially small in the future, but today it is a hardware costs lead weight. (~5 of every 6 GB of blockchain data is Spam)
The average crypto hobbyist is not going to download and run a Zcash full node that gives them no benefits, while costing 300GB of space plus the CPU resources.