Thank you @GGuy, your suggestions are supportive of our team’s efforts toward the growth and adoption of Zcash. I am happy to share that as part of our major grant, we will expand the quarterly report to include Operational Transparency Report alongside User Information Request Report and Infra usage with load & distributed setup. And support further requests for transparency as and when feasible.
I would also like to make it known that we have NOT reached out to any individual or organizations to promote or support our grant funding in any capacity, including the creation of anon accounts or such.
I don’t agree with what you propose. But if you have an idea, you should draft it and propose it to the community as a follow-up for the end of the dev fund as established in zip-1014.
I believe that wallets could offer their users to donate some shielded ZEC when they send or shield funds, or come up with a business model of their own. I’m convinced that Dev Funds are crucial to long term ecosystem-wide development. It’s ok that in the early stages wallets and other end-user facing developments are funded from it, but in the long term, those should have their funding coming from the users they directly benefit and not the funds from the Dev Fund, unless there has been a proven record that the outcomes produced by those funded teams produce a positive feedback loop where the whole ecosystem benefits from the improvements produced.
A real example of what I’m talking about has been the battle for the fastest syncing wallet. Let’s think about it and question ourselves:
Did that contribute to improving the overall well-being of the Zcash community?
How can others benefit from Blaze or Warp Sync if they don’t want to fork the whole wallet code?
How do other developers benefit from the breakthroughs that wallet teams funded from “the Dev Fund” produce?
I think all this questions are worth exploring and reflecting about before thinking about changing go gets which portion of a Dev Fund and to do what.
UPDATE: Based on our discussions with the ZCG committee and feedback from the community, the grant milestone payouts have been updated to be based on the development and release deliverables in line with our past grants(in lieu of monthly payouts and reports). A retroactive highlights document has been attached to the grant to go over the ongoing efforts in 2022, and a marketing budget of $45,600 has been added for a successful launch and adoption strategy following the Nighthawk Wallet v2.0 Public Release.
UPDATE: The grant is again updated to remove the marketing portion for launch plans to be reconsidered next year.
@refinance that portion is for the infra and bandwidth costs for the cluster of 9 instances and additional ZSA work we have in our pipeline this year. The compensation for the team members is a separate item.
@nextiscrypto ZCG votes on grants are not made public, I’m not sure where you are getting this information from. I would prefer to keep my past ZCG activities private given the sensitive nature and to set a professional standard. As for the Ycash wallet, I want to be clear, my vote was not against, there were outstanding items regarding clarity on documentation and PR deliverables that needed to be reviewed and updated in the grant, but the committee decided to call for a vote in the meeting with ZF and I decided to confirm the updates to the grant(which came in later) before voting. Obviously, the Ycash Wallet with warp sync was the only one useable for casual users with the heavy load on the network and deserved the funding.
@tokidoki you are right, there are 3 standalone projects, and also the ZSA work on each of them, but the team working on it is the same and it makes more sense operationally and financially to execute. Much higher compensation has been approved for lesser deliverables, and I’m confident in my team’s capability to support critical services and app development on the Zcash network.
@aiyadt, The @ZcashGrants Committee has decided to partially fund the NightHawk team’s proposal for a total of $551,000, which consists of $375,000 for wallet development, $148,000 for lightwalletd and ZcashBlockExplorer infrastructure, and $28,000 of retroactive funding for lightwalletd and ZcashBlockExplorer infrastructure support.
Please note that for 2023, given budgetary concerns, ZCG will cap all wallet developer grants at $375,000. ZCG believes this amount is fair and consistent with previous grants approved for wallet development. This cap may be lifted at ZCG’s discretion if market conditions significantly improve. In addition, NightHawk and other wallet teams are still eligible to apply for additional funding for non-wallet development projects.
@decentralistdan Thank You for relaying the committee’s message.
The grant process and the decision have left me no choice but to accept the partial funding with the reduced team and deliverables to continue supporting and running mission-critical services to advance Zcash adoption as expected by the broader community. Here is the link to the updated grant as per ZCG’s budgetary constraints: Gallery View: Zcash Community Grants Program
Conducive to work towards delivering our roadmap charted for the Zcash network; Nighthawk Apps, an independent team, will pursue the direct-grant option as put forth in ZIP-1014 to perform major ongoing development and decentralization efforts.
The hidden message above links a tweet from the grantee of this grant that community members might find interesting. For those that are blocked by aiyadt, open the tweet in a browser without being signed in to twitter.
