Maya Protocol Advanced Shielded ZEC Support (Retroactive Grant)

Community Grants Retroactive Grants
1

Retroactive Grant Application - Maya Protocol Advanced Shielded ZEC Support

Full application on GitHub: Issue #19 - Retroactive Grant Application - Maya Protocol Advanced Shielded ZEC Support

Organization

Maya Protocol

Application Owner

@ahdzib-maya (Itzamna)

Requested Grant Amount

$45,000

Category

Infrastructure

Project Summary

Maya Protocol has built and deployed full end-to-end shielded Zcash (ZEC) support on its cross-chain decentralized exchange, enabling users to perform native cross-chain swaps directly to and from shielded (Sapling/Orchard) addresses without intermediaries, KYC, or custodians. This represents the first and only decentralized, permissionless cross-chain DEX with native shielded ZEC support, giving Zcash users unprecedented access to cross-chain liquidity while preserving their financial privacy.

Background

A Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) grant titled “Transparent & Shielded DEX with Maya Protocol” was awarded to Hanh Huynh Huu (Ywallet Creator) to support the initial Zcash integration concept. Maya Protocol did not receive any portion of those funds. Nevertheless, the Maya Protocol team independently carried out the full engineering effort to bring Zcash to production on the Maya DEX.

This retroactive grant application covers the entirety of Maya Protocol’s uncompensated engineering work to deliver production-grade transparent and shielded ZEC support, including:

  • Shielded inbound transaction support — Users can send ZEC from shielded addresses to Maya Protocol’s vault, with the system correctly processing the swap using OP_RETURN memos.
    • Shielded outbound swap destinations — Full end-to-end shielded support where swap outputs are sent directly to Unified Addresses (UA), Sapling, and Orchard receivers.
      • Shielded memo parsing — Bifrost can derive inbound viewing keys (IVK) and trial-decrypt Sapling/Orchard notes to read shielded memos, enabling shielded-to-shielded swap flows.
        • TEX/UA address normalization — All ZEC addresses (TEX, Unified) are normalized to their default receiver before matching outbound transactions.
          • NU6/NU6.1 network upgrade support — Full support for the Zcash NU6 and NU6.1 consensus upgrades
              • UTXO management hardening — Extensive work on ZEC UTXO reservation, signing, checkpoint flows, solvency checks, and double-spend prevention.
                • Rust-to-Go FFI layer — Built and maintained Rust bindings (via librustzcash and UniFI) exposing shielded cryptographic operations to Maya’s Go-based Bifrost client.

              • Impact on the Zcash Ecosystem

            • This work makes Maya Protocol the first decentralized cross-chain exchange where users can:

            1. Swap any supported asset (BTC, ETH, RUNE, CACAO, stablecoins, etc.) directly into a shielded ZEC address
              1. Swap from shielded ZEC into any other supported asset
                1. Do so without KYC, sign-ups, or custodial risk
              3. This directly advances Zcash’s mission of financial privacy by giving shielded ZEC real cross-chain utility and liquidity access. Services like BitcoinVN (which received a Coinholder grant for their shielded ZEC instant swap service) already leverage Maya Protocol’s infrastructure for their cross-chain swap functionality.

            3. Proof of Completion

          • All work is publicly verifiable in the MAYANode GitLab repository. Key merged merge requests include:
        • Core Shielded Support:
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Call For Proposals: Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program (Q1 2026)
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+1, this is extremely important work. I’d support doubling the reward. Thank you Maya!

2 Likes