Title says it all.
Bear market is for shipping code & features. I request @ZcashGrants & community to not fund big marketing efforts (> 50k USD). Preserve dev fund so we can fund the developers during this bear market.
Note: We can get a lot done for the same amount due to stock market & economy free fall around the world.
I don’t agree! We all know that in the past 5 years, zcash marketing wasn’t a thing in the crypto industry!
No real marketing effort = Strategic error.
I think there is good reason to have a high bar for approving costly marketing efforts (as always), and perhaps prioritize development to the extent possible. But I believe it would be a mistake to discourage new marketing campaigns - we can’t know when the market will turn around and don’t want to miss the boat. Not to mention that marketing efforts stick around these days - content that becomes available today will still be available 6 months or 3 years from now.
Appreciate the sentiment, but we at ECC are ramping marketing efforts. It’s the right time with shielded ZEC now accessible on mobile phones and the push forward with new era of zk, a solid roadmap, policy conversations, and innovation that’s happening elsewhere.
We need to enlarge the tent: bring more people in, drive increased use, engage and empower more voices.
However, we only have so much budget and it’s affected by coin price and will increase or lower spending based on the state of the market and the ZEC coin price specifically.
Fwiw, there is a lot less noise to try to cut through in a bear market. Let’s use the opportunity!
Disagree. We spent the last 4-5 years not marketing Zcash and now Halo is getting released but the world is unaware of it 
I propose continued ramp up of marketing and awareness spends
There’s a saying that “bear markets are for building.” And so I totally see some merit to what you’re saying @dontbeevil.
But there’s different kinds of marketing. Rather than say 0 marketing for now, a better question would be, what initiatives can still add value at a time when market sentiment might be suffering?
Educational content will always be valuable. I’d personally like to see more Zcash educational/informational content getting pushed out.
Another initiative that should continue is marketing efforts to attract builders to the ecosystem.
With all this said, I have to agree with you that hype initiatives during a bear market make no sense. So anything that would be viewed as trying to positively influence price temporarily is probably not very useful at this time as there’s not a lot of momentum to be harnessed right now.
Exactly
Could not agree more
Rather than hype initiatives, we need to build a BASE. Our target market is NOT crypto people exclusively but all people who want to move money through “space and time”. We have to educate everyone we can why owning fundamentally hard assets is an asymmetric bet…
There is only 21 million coins available (technically 14 million), market caps are derived from the trading value of roughly 6-7% float of coins over a long period of time… With proper educational initiatives we could drastically change Zcash price trajectory.
This is not a “good to have” with zcash, I would say a proper rollout of educational hub is a must have! 
Cheers everyone! Glad to see everyone back at it debating next steps for Zcash!
Road to 200,000 ZODLrs 
We plan to rollout an educational site within the next week or so. We’re also planning for some other things with Zero.
BTW, we are hosting a Cypherpunk event in Austin during Consensus in partnership with Filecoin and Flexa. If anyone is interested and going to be in town, DM me and I’ll make sure you get an invite.
Well said!
Fully agreed
My point exactly, crypto is in free fall, we need to push brakes as much as possible & figure out smart / cheap ways to get the same output.
I think that we should always push for adoption, but not only from the user base. Why don’t we start to work with industry and institution?
Central banks all around the world are already developing their CBDC, sometimes with privacy in mind. Also a lot of talk about stablecoin took place in these days due to the Luna fiasco. What better opportunity for ZSAs? So let’s take the two things and see it as an opportunity for the world to have private and decentralized stablecoins / CBDC.
Put up a round table with Fed and discuss how a CBDC should be and think how Zcash could fulfill it. Transactions can stay private and at the same time be compliant with the memo feature, but there are many other aspects to be defined.
Put up another round table with major stablecoin players in the cryptocurrency space such as Tether (USDT), Circle (USDC), Maker DAO (DAI), Paxos (BUSD, USDP).
The point is trying to be pro-active and try define together with the industry and institution how CBDC/stables should be and how they could fit on Zcash:
By involving relevant actors in due time we can design ZSAs in the best possible way and have major players onboard from the beginning.
Having institutional people onboard would be of great help in putting up the talks with Fed. Chair of SEC Gary Gensler is a strong advocate of Zcash technology. I guess it should not be too difficult to involve him and push our case.
Regarding major stablecoin issuers, a dear friend of mine has direct contact to Paolo Ardoino and Giancarlo Devasini (CTO and CFO of Tether), and we can provide their mobile to @zooko . We don’t have contact for other mentioned stablecoin issuers but getting their attention for a business proposal shouldn’t be hard. CZ from Binance is always keen on developing the blockchain space, as well as Maker. Circle is probably the most institutional player but that would just add more value to the talks.
ZSAs
Memo
PoS
Scalability
These enablers are already in place or being developed. Let’s take the opportunity to do it with the industry.
As already discussed in ZSAs and Zcash Economics ECC blog post, there are many concerns regarding security. The Top-heavy problem would be particularly relevant, and this discussion should go together with the PoS consensus.
Competitors: awareness about the need for privacy in monetary transactions is slowly increasing and new products are going to be on the shelf. Aztec.network is releasing a permissionless private payment protocol on Ethereum, which could allow users to send tokens in a private manner directly on L1. In case major DeFi protocol would implement Aztec users would also be able to use AMM, PERPS, etc . privately.
And here I come with the second major risk for not taking action
Loss of first comer advantage: Zcash has arguably the best tech for private transaction, with the advantage of voluntary disclosure of information with the encrypted Memo feature. But it already happened in the past that projects with the greatest intuitions ahead of time have been forgotten.
For example, my friends and I closely followed Spell of Genesis (SoG), a card game based on Counterparty (a Bitcoin sidechain). BitCrystal, the game platform, conducted an ICO in 2014 to develop the card game, inventing collectibles on the blockchain, AKA NFT technology. TL;DR in 2017 Dapper Labs came with Cryptokitties and stole them the scene; ERC 721 Specs were first proposed in Jan 2018. Where is SoG now? They moved to Ethereum but most of the crowd never heard about them.
If you want to read the full story, here is the research that I wrote for The Cryptonomist at the beginning of last year.
The above suggestion is intended only to create value for Zcash hodlers and supporters. I know that this is highly improbable, but ECC could choose to develop a specific technology or add an exception for licensing. That wouldn’t clearly be in the interest of the Zcash community.
If Zcash becomes a settlement layer for stablecoins and Fed CBDC (yes I know it is a wet dream but not impossible), BoE and CBE would follow. It would create a huge transaction volume and Zcash adoption.
Do we want to create the tech for other projects’ sake and miss every train, or shall we start to push for players to start to use it? I agree that our great devs should always be funded so they can fuel innovation on the protocol, but there must be a right balance also with marketing and IMHO effort to start talks in the industry. Otherwise we risk being remembered by few as the project with the best tech that never went to market.
Hope this post will trigger some discussion / action! Next week Zooko will be at the SNB-CIF Conference on Cryptoassets and Financial Innovation in Switzerland, taking a keynote lecture in front of the guys of the Fed so maybe the chance to start a talk is already there.
I regret not being clear in the message. We should make partnerships, post blogs, work with industry for adoption of Halo 2 etc. What I’m opposed to is spending large amount on producing videos.
As a great example of that strategy at work, I’m relatively new to crypto and totally new to Zcash, and the recent videos are what brought me here. Even if Zcash is falling relative to fiat, it doesn’t make sense to me to cut the video budget now.
First, Zcash is the only brand I know of with a dedicated, high-quality media channel aiming to reach people outside the crypto space. That will not last forever, and Zcash should take advantage of the head start to build a library of useful videos before engagement is divided among whatever competitors inevitably replicate the strategy. Second, producing easily accessible videos with decent distribution budgets is probably the best and most reliable marketing strategy to reach non-crypto folks. You can try to build the community by poaching fans from other currencies, but if you want to get more people into the whole space, you need to make content that’s easy to find and easy to digest.
If the goal is to spread awareness and bring new voices into the community, video is actually inexpensive compared to a lot of other marketing strategies.
While I agree we’re not at the best time to spend too much of ZCG resources, videos on the internet has the biggest potential of outreach. Good videos will be shared and along with it, good ideas.
The engagement is already divided, and Zcash doesn’t get enough of it compared to other projects. Say what you want about the questionable claims made by other projects, their organic growth seems to be bigger than Zcash. Regardless if these growth are mostly fueled by speculation or even outright scams, they still get more lights than Zcash.
My point is: we should save more resources for the future generation of Zcashers but we shouldn’t stop spending on great education resources. Because those next generation needs to be recruited.
I so agree!
Halo is groundbreaking tech and no one seems to know it’s happening in just a couple days!
I’m new here and I pretty much just luckily stumbled onto the fact that trustless pools are now possible, and that’s what brought me in.
Greetings!
I work in the digital marketing area and I perfectly understand your point and in a way I agree with you.
But I have a small comment: even if the market is bearish, you should not neglect the dissemination of Zcash, its benefits and all the features that we, the members of this community, already know. Why? Because there are always new people coming to the community, joining the ecosystem and adopting the use of ZEC.
If there is no more marketing, the critical mass of new users will stop growing, which are, in my opinion, the ones that will make Zcash grow day by day.
I think there needs to be a balance: not to definitely pause marketing efforts, but perhaps focus them better to optimize the resources used.
Thanks for this topic. Interesting discussion. 
I like your suggestion.
I would add making an effort in universities. Educate from the beginning those people who are starting to use these technologies.
Why? Because those university students are the investors, entrepreneurs and businessmen of the not too distant future, and if they adopt Zcash, the path is already created.
I see it as “think or seed” for the future. I think the business sector and the education sector go hand in hand.
More education = more adoption.
My best regards and respect to you!
I agree completely! With such groundbreaking tech of the trustless setup, there should still be marketing as it seems not many people are aware of it currently, outside of the zcash community.
