Privacy Executive Roundtable

Community Grants Applications
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Introduction

Hi Zcash Community—Michelle Sun here, partnerships lead for the Iron Fish Foundation.
Iron Fish’s protocol engineering team joined Coinbase earlier this year, but the Foundation remains fully active, focused on advancing privacy adoption across Web3 and AI.
We’ve submitted a grant application (link below) for a Privacy-X Executive Roundtable PoC and would love your feedback. Please see the full proposal at the end of this post for budget, milestones, and technical details.

Privacy-X Executive Roundtable – Turning Shielded Assets Into Live Integrations

A high-trust, invite-only salon that brings wallet, exchange, and AI executives together to demo Zcash Shielded Assets, solve integration hurdles in real time, and green-light concrete PoCs—all within a six-month pilot.

Who We Are

  • Elena Nadolinski – Founder of Iron Fish, ZK-protocol engineer, long-time privacy advocate.
  • Michelle Sun – ex-Solana Head of DeFi; 10-year operator in crypto growth & partnerships.
  • Lean execution crew – Michelle + a seasoned EA who already shipped the Iron Fish × Ledger meme campaign in <10 hrs/week founder time.

What We Bring to Zcash – Day-One Impact

Metric Ready for PoC Launch
Executive seats per salon 12 (C-level only)
Anchor-speaker pipeline Outreach list includes Ledger, Brave, Coinbase privacy team
Target integration PoCs ≥ 2 Shielded-USDC pilots
Public deliverables 2 × “Privacy Pulse” briefs (CC-BY) + 2 highlight reels
Reach Wallets, exchanges, AI labs spanning US, EU, APAC

No speculative user acquisition—just direct access to the people who ship features.

Why a Private Roundtable PoC Matters

  1. High-trust environment → real talk. Execs share obstacles they’d never post on social.
  2. Lightning-fast feedback loop. Insights feed straight into Zcash docs, SDKs, and marketing.
  3. Public halo with zero leaks. Anonymized briefs turn closed-door insights into cite-able content.
  4. Micro-grants seed immediate action. Wallet devs leave the call and start Shielded-USDC prototypes.

Our Commitment

  • Two-salon PoC (Aug & Oct 2025) run entirely by our lean team.
  • All recordings, transcripts, KPI dashboards, and mailing lists handed to ZCG/ECC.
  • If KPIs hit, we scale to a monthly cadence in 2026—funded by new partners or follow-on grants.

Why Now

  • ZSA main-net launch is imminent—executives finalize 2026 road-maps in Q3/Q4; our timing lets Shielded-USDC land on those agendas.
  • AI-privacy regulation is heating up (EU AI Act, US AI Safety EO drafts); enterprises are actively exploring compliant privacy rails.
  • Conference season overlap (Permissionless, Money20/20, Zcon) means execs are already in “partnership mode.” Our salons provide the private room that public conferences can’t.
  • Fresh post-acquisition spotlight on Iron Fish gives the Foundation extra credibility and reach.

The Bottom Line

Iron Fish Foundation can deliver a C-suite funnel that turns Shielded Assets from launch code into live integrations—within six months. We’re ready to start.

Questions? Drop them below or email me at michelle@ironfish.network.
:right_arrow: Full Grant Proposal – Budget & Milestones
(opens in a new tab)

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Hi @michelleironfish - Welcome to the forum, and thank you for submitting your grant proposal! We will review it in the upcoming weeks and reach out if we have any questions.

In the meantime, if you have any questions for us, you can post them to this thread or DM us at @ZcashGrants.

Zcash Community - We want to hear your feedback on this grant! You can post your comments to this thread or DM us at @ZcashGrants if you’d like to provide feedback in private.

Thanks!

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Thank you for the proposal. Once Zcash Shielded Assets are live I might support it.

Currently I think this proposal is premature using (Proof of Concept Shielded stable coins).
Id recommend resubmitting once shielded assets are live on the Zcash blockchain.

If you would like to put your skills to work now why not submit a similar proposal focused on shielded Zcash adoption? Shielded Zcash is available now but lacks full support by many exchanges and industry partners today. Focus on converting transparent Zcash integrations into shielded ones instead. That will help build a stronger foundation for shielded asset adoption when it arrives.

Other chains will use zk-SNARKs to implement a shielded pool for stablecoins in the future. Our existing shielded pool is our competitive advantage today (unfortunately undermined by unshielded Zcash).

The more we do now to increase shielded adoption today (while simultaneously depreciating transparency) the better we will be able to compete with shielded asset competition in the future).

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I threw up a little into my mouth when I read this.

It’s okay. I was able to swallow again, washing it down with some economical robusta.

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Just as Satoshi envisioned, indeed.

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Totally hear you and @aaal. If you’re a cypherpunk at heart, the phrase “C-level only” probably tastes like corporate instant coffee.

But here’s the honest reason we’re doing it:

The people who build and ship the tools used by millions still sit in institutions. If we want shielded transactions to become the default, we need to make it effortless for them to integrate privacy into their systems—not beg them after the fact.

We’re not asking them to shape the mission. That’s already written. We’re just creating a room where they finally have to listen to us—and walk out with a real PoC, not a PR soundbite.

You can think of the salons as Trojan horses for privacy tech. They’re not about pleasing execs—they’re about giving them no excuse not to ship ZSA.

And if it works? We’ll have stealth-installed shielded UX across wallets, exchanges, and maybe even agentic AI infrastructure—without ever compromising what privacy is really about: freedom from surveillance, censorship, and control.

We’re not trying to make privacy palatable to institutions—we’re making institutions irrelevant to privacy, by hardwiring it into their default infrastructure.

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Very much appreciate this perspective—and I agree that increasing shielded ZEC adoption today is critical to Zcash’s long-term edge.

That said, I’d love to share why we think starting the institutional conversation now (even while ZSAs are still in testnet) isn’t premature—it’s strategic.

For most institutions, especially wallets and exchanges, the process of understanding, prioritizing, and implementing privacy tech isn’t fast.

It often takes 3–6 months of internal reviews, integration testing, and stakeholder buy-in before something like Shielded USDC goes live.

By beginning outreach now—through these curated roundtables—we ensure that by the time ZSAs launch, these partners are already educated, bought in, and technically unblocked. This increases the chances we see real usage in Q1–Q2 2026, instead of spending a year chasing after cold leads post-launch.

Plus, the timing around stablecoins is unique right now:

  • Institutional focus on MiCA compliance and the EU pilot regime
  • Growing awareness of transaction-level privacy risks in AI-native payments
  • Ledger, Brave, and others showing interest in privacy narratives

We see this PoC roundtable series as laying the runway—not competing with shielded ZEC advocacy, but complementing it by giving ZSA a soft landing once it arrives.

That said, we deeply respect the focus on maximizing the shielded pool now, and we’re absolutely open to collaborating on campaigns that make that happen too.

Thanks for the thoughtful input—it’s helping us strengthen the plan.

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Satoshi Nakamoto would like a word with you. Aside from that, I understand and agree with your points.

Let’s say that I am for the sake of the argument. Do you think it feels right that the orgs in leadership of this project have ignored us so hard for so long and it took the efforts of a single individual, @hanh, followed by Shielded Labs, to maybe reverse the tide?

Who are the anon cypherpunks left in this project? How come things are this way in a project supposedly about privacy? I think you do understand why people like me feel a bit sore when topics like this come up.

Anyway, my questions were rhetorical, no need to answer given the idea isn’t to go off-topic. Good luck with this project.

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Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I did not find it at all persuasive.

Then please submit a proposal to create privacy roundtables to increase shielded support now. Only after proving success there might I support this proposal where success or failure (measured by live shielded stablecoin integrations) cannot be measured for many months.

This proposal is extremely premature. Please prove yourself by using the shielded transaction technology available today.

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Sounds awesome!!

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This doesn’t pass the smell test.

The conversation started a long time ago with these and many others.

[Ledger: A Path Forward for Ledger and Zcash]
(a lot of people here are upset at Ledger, perhaps with good reason.)
[Brave: Brave + Zcash]
(Zcash is in Brave Browser. This is great! But they’re in the loop.)
[Coinbase: ZEC is launching on Coinbase Pro]
(this link is dated 2018. Also Fred Ehrsam, Co-founder at Coinbase, was an early investor, at least back to around launch in 2016. I think Coinbase knows about Zcash.)

Communication between executives happens privately (without expensive grants for salons) when they want to communicate, sometimes with great haste.

Publicly, It plays out everyday (without expensive grants) online.

If ZSAs are a workable, good thing, it will be newsworthy and everyone will know.*

Setting up virtual calls and getting the figurehead advocates publicly leading projects (briefly) on the line and on topic might be worth doing (? not my world), but I don’t think it should cost $51k, seems almost 10x too much.

More, the entirety of any discussions funded in this way should be made public! Practicing transparency for institutions while working toward protecting the privacy of individuals…

Exclusive meetings with later briefings and highlight reels sounds like back room stuff, and a PR effort. If it is, okay, but let’s just call it that.

When you’re dealing with CEOs you have two things going on, deciding directions (rarely changed at a quick chit-chat) and PR soundbites (disjoint from actual directives and sometimes any deep understanding at all).

This sounds really naive, possibly intentionally deceptive. Executives won’t be ‘solving integration hurdles in real time.’

This application should be justified with why this is a value add for Zcash. If it is decided that it is, it should have a reasonable cost and a information flow with the people who have funded it (all ZEC users).

I urge the ZCG to reject this proposal as it stands. It has the optics of and the effect that the block subsidy is propping up big wig happenings and consultants while engineering efforts are still tenuous and uncertain. It reminds me (in a smaller way) of prior mistakes in resource allocation, where courting ‘important’ entities came at the cost of neglecting more grounded issues.

*If ZSAs are the way forward, let’s make sure that they work well first in all the important ways. Grants relating to this should be allocated to testing, auditing, rolling out. In short, engineer a product, not a promotion. A good product. The rest will follow, as the executives smell money, and people without titles build useful things.

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