A continuous report on developer education, onboarding, community outreach, and building the pathway from learning to contribution.
At a Glance
Programs delivered
- One six-week Developer Workshop, with 5 technical guest sessions from ecosystem builders
- One two-day Developer Sprint format, built and run
- One university partnership delivered (Blockchain LAUTECH)
- 40+ developers onboarded across the Workshop and Sprint
What developers built
- 7 working prototypes shipped in the Mini Build Challenge — including Turnstile, Z Tips, ZEC Tip, ZPortal, and Zcash RPC Studio
- 3 recognized winners: Turnstile (Lycantho), Z Tips (0xskinny), Z-Escrow (Rampop)
Pipeline ahead
- 3 more Developer Sprints scheduled
- 2 more university communities locked in
- 1 regional builder event confirmed — Web3 Lagos Conference (ZCG-approved)
Tooling & resources in progress
- Zcash Developer Curriculum — in refinement
- builders-zcash learning portal — prototype live, V1 in progress
create-zcash-appscaffolder + TypeScript SDK — proposed
Introduction
I went back and forth on whether I was ready to share everything I’ve been doing in the ecosystem so far. But as Austin Kleon puts it in Show Your Work!: “Become a documentarian of what you do.”
One question has sat at the center of my contributions to Zcash — especially after a conversation with @dismad, who asked me plainly: “Why are you here?” He added that “if you have no direction, no purpose, then others will end up directing you.” Those two statements have shaped my entire journey in this ecosystem, and they led me to the question that now drives my work:
How do I make it easier for a developer to go from discovering Zcash to actually building something with it?
Zcash has powerful technology, active engineers, and an expanding ecosystem of wallets, infrastructure, applications, and developer tools.
A developer might hear about shielded transactions, zero-knowledge proofs, Zebra, Zaino, wallets, RPCs, or the Z3 Stack and think:
“This is interesting. I want to build something.”
Then the questions begin:
Where do I start? What should I learn first? Which part of the stack do I need? How do I set up a node? How do I interact with it? How do I actually build a privacy-preserving application?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who do I ask when I get stuck?
That realization gradually changed the direction of my work. I stopped thinking about developer education as simply organizing workshops, and started thinking about building a pathway — one that takes someone from:
Discover → Learn → Build → Experiment → Contribute
The goal is a developer onboarding pipeline that combines education, community, hands-on building, and tooling through ZecHub while contributing to the wider zcash ecosystem.
This post is my attempt to document that journey.
Starting With Developer Education
The first major step was building a structured Zcash Developer Curriculum.
The idea was straightforward: instead of expecting new developers to independently navigate documentation, repositories, infrastructure, and different ecosystem projects, give them a guided path. The curriculum is still being refined, and I’m grateful to the Zcashers who’ve helped improve it — you can see it here. I am greatful to dismad, Squirrel and @pacu for helping to review and refine this Curriculum.
It introduces developers to blockchain fundamentals, financial privacy, Zcash architecture, shielded transactions, the Zcash ecosystem, the Z3 Stack (Zebra, Zaino, Zallet), Zcash RPC, wallet infrastructure, payment applications, and open-source contribution.
The objective was never simply to teach developers about Zcash. It was to get them to the point where they could start building.
The Six-Week Developer Workshop
The curriculum evolved into a six-week virtual Developer Workshop combining structured learning, practical exercises, technical guest sessions, and exposure to real projects.
One moment stands out from the planning. After ZecHub’s DAO initial rejection of my proposal, I decided to run the workshop anyway. I told @squirrel about that decision, and he said that whatever support I needed, I should just ask. That strengthened my resolve to continue.
One of the most valuable components was bringing ecosystem builders and engineers directly into the learning environment. Participants learned from people working on different parts of the stack:
- Zcash Architecture — @shieldedmark (Shielded Labs) walked participants through how the components of Zcash fit together.
- Zcash RPC — dismad led a session on RPC usage, helping developers move from understanding the protocol to interacting with the infrastructure.
- Builder Series: Nozy Wallet — @Lowo introduced wallet application development.
- ZcashNames — Zechariah and @craftsoldier demonstrated how ecosystem applications are being built around Zcash.
- CipherPay × Cipherscan — @Kenbak shared payment flow design and how Zcash fits into practical payment infrastructure.
These sessions mattered because developers weren’t only learning concepts from slides — they were watching real builders explain real systems.
Another memorable milestone was launching a Zebra node on a VPS (painful, since it got deleted without warning) we are currently working on syncing another node on a Pi5.
The Learning Model: Build While You Learn
The strongest lesson from the workshop was that developers learn faster when they learn and build at the same time.
Don’t wait until developers finish learning before they start building.
Instead, the loop looks like this:
Learn → Build → Get stuck → Research → Ask questions → Understand → Build again
This became the foundation for everything that followed.
The Zcash Developer Sprint
After the six-week workshop, I kept coming back to a piece of advice a Zcasher once gave me: “Make the workshops as simple as possible — they’ll get complex on their own when people go deeper.” The workshop provides depth, but it also asks for a significant time commitment.
To create a lower-friction entry point, I built the Zcash Developer Sprint — the initial learning journey compressed into an intensive two-day program.
Day 1 — Blockchain Basics + Zcash: blockchain fundamentals, financial privacy, introduction to Zcash, shielded transactions, ecosystem overview.
Day 2 — Building on Zcash: the Z3 Stack (Zebra, Zaino, Zallet), node setup, RPC usage, and building simple applications.
The goal is to move a developer from “I’ve heard about Zcash” to “I’ve interacted with Zcash infrastructure.”
Taking the Sprint to Universities
The next question was simple: where do I find more developers?
My answer was universities. I’ve been reaching out to blockchain clubs and developer communities on campuses, bringing the Developer Sprint directly to students and campus builders.
The reasoning is straightforward. Universities are a continuous pipeline of technically curious people already learning programming, computer science, engineering, mathematics, and software development — but many simply haven’t encountered Zcash yet. So instead of waiting for them to find the ecosystem on their own, I take the ecosystem to them.
The aim is repeatable partnerships around the Sprint, not isolated one-off events. Two more communities are already locked in, with three additional Sprints scheduled for the coming months.
I’m also onboarding developers through builder-centered events in my region — a replica of what @readymouse and the Zecsy team are doing in Europe. The first of these will be at the Web3 Lagos Conference, which ZCG recently approved.
First Developer Sprint: Blockchain LAUTECH
The first Developer Sprint was organized in partnership with Blockchain LAUTECH; an important milestone, because it showed the model could travel into a university community and be delivered as a practical onboarding experience.
The Sprint didn’t end when the final presentation ended. It ended with developers building.
The Mini Build Challenge
Participants were challenged to apply what they’d learned by creating working prototypes. Projects included Turnstile, Z Tips, ZEC Tip, ZPortal, Zcash RPC Studio, and other application prototypes.
Three winners were recognized:
- Turnstile — Lycantho
- Z Tips — 0xskinny
- Z-Escrow — Rampop
But the most important outcome wasn’t who won. It was proof of something I’d suspected:
Give developers enough context, the right tools, and a reason to build — and they can surprise you.
Participants moved from learning Zcash to shipping something built with Zcash in a very short window. The ZecHub Hackathon reinforced the same lesson: practical projects accelerate learning in ways passive consumption can’t.
That’s the distinction I care about. I don’t want to create developers who can explain Zcash. I want to help create developers who can use it.
The Scaffolding Problem
The more developers I worked with, the more I saw that workshops alone weren’t enough.
Picture a developer who has finished a workshop. They understand shielded transactions. They know what Zebra is. They’ve used RPC. They understand the basic architecture. Then they go home and think:
“Okay… now I want to build my own application.”
That’s where the next barrier appears. They still have to figure out how to assemble the pieces — setting up infrastructure, understanding Unified Addresses, interacting with node/indexer services, working with shielded pools and viewing keys, and wiring different components together across different technologies. For web developers especially, this is a steep wall.
“I understand shielded payments. Now how do I actually build an application that detects one?”
This is the problem the proposed create-zcash-app scaffolder and TypeScript SDK is designed around: a batteries-included starting point that takes a web developer from nothing to a working shielded-payment application against a local Zcash chain in minutes.
npx create-zcash-app → choose a template → local Zcash dev environment →
connect to Z3 → use the SDK → build → detect a shielded payment
It isn’t a live product yet, and I’m intentionally documenting it as work in progress. The idea is to provide an application-layer starting point on top of existing Zcash infrastructure, rather than asking every developer to assemble everything from scratch — a model that has worked for new developers in other ecosystems.
The distinction matters: Z3 provides the infrastructure; the scaffolder provides the application-layer starting point. I’m not trying to rebuild Zcash infrastructure (I don’t have the capacity to, and I don’t need to). I plan to work closely with @ZCG, shieldedlLabs, tacyhon, zodl, and ZecHub on this.
The Builders Learning Website
Another piece of the puzzle is the builders-zcash learning website.
I landed on this direction early, after a meeting with @Michae2xl and shieldedmark, and it was part of my presentation at the engineering office hours Mark invited me to. It isn’t live yet, but you can view the prototype here while my team and I work toward the V1 release.
Here’s how I see the pieces fitting together: the website provides the educational context, the scaffolder and SDK provide the technical starting point, the workshops and Sprints provide human guidance, and the ecosystem provides the projects and communities developers eventually contribute to.
Learning resources → Understand a concept → Run a tutorial →
Scaffold an application → Modify the code → Build → Experiment →
Join the community → Contribute
My plan is for the application templates and runnable tutorials to live inside builders-zcash website rather than as a competing standalone platform — working in tandem with ZecHub. This is what I mean when I describe my work as onboarding developers.
Not Reinventing the Wheel
A principle that has guided all of this: my goal isn’t to recreate what already exists.
There’s already strong infrastructure being built across Zcash; Z3: Zebra, Zaino, Zallet, developer tooling, wallet infrastructure, existing documentation, and ecosystem applications. My work is designed to connect developers to these components, positioning the application layer on top of Z3 and coordinating with existing initiatives like ZecHub.
The same philosophy applies to the education work. I’m not trying to replace existing documentation or developer resources. I’m trying to make them easier to enter and easier to use.
Why This Matters
Developer growth is ultimately ecosystem growth. More developers can lead to more applications, more users, more integrations, better tooling, more experimentation, more open-source contributions, more wallets and payment experiences, and more people solving real problems with privacy-preserving technology. The curriculum is also being adapted by different ambassador communities for their own initiatives which is a proof that it is a valuable addition to the zcash ecosystem.
So the goal isn’t to maximize workshop attendance for its own sake. The real metric is:
How many developers move further into the ecosystem because of these programs?
What I’ve Learned
Developers need a pathway. A large documentation library is valuable, but a beginner still needs to know where to start.
Developers learn by building. The Mini Build Challenge reinforced that practical implementation accelerates understanding.
Real builders make the ecosystem tangible. Guest sessions let learners see how Zcash technology is actually used. (Kudos to the teams constantly improving the Zcash protocol.)
Universities are an important talent pipeline. They’re a natural environment for introducing developers to emerging technology.
Tooling and education should reinforce each other.
Onboarding is a continuous process. A two-day Sprint isn’t the destination — it’s an entry point.
Rejection doesn’t always means you are wrong: A rejection can just mean that your idea will need to be proven before it is accepted.
Where This Is Going
The immediate objective is to keep expanding the developer pipeline while improving the scaffolding around it:
- More Developer Sprints and university partnerships (three more Sprints already scheduled)
- More structured workshops and technical guest sessions
- More hands-on projects and runnable examples
- Better documentation, developer tooling, SDKs, and application templates
- Stronger pathways into open source
The longer-term vision is for a developer to encounter Zcash anywhere and find a clear path from “What is Zcash?” to “I’m building my first application” to “I’m contributing to the ecosystem.”
An Ongoing Report
This will remain a living forum post. I’ll keep adding updates as I partner with new universities, run more Sprints, onboard developers, improve the curriculum, build tooling, launch templates, and connect developers with ecosystem projects.
The intention is to make the work measurable and transparent — not just “I hosted another workshop,” but “here’s how many developers entered, what they learned, what they built, what they did next, and how I’m improving the pipeline.”
Closing
There’s already incredible technical work happening across Zcash. My focus is on building the on-ramp that lets more developers reach it. I see my role as:
Help developers discover the ecosystem. Help them understand the technology. Give them something they can build. Connect them with people who can help. And ultimately help them become contributors.
The Developer Workshop, the Developer Sprint, university outreach, the builders-zcash portal, and the proposed scaffolding tooling are all pieces of the same effort:
Raising the next generation of developers for the Zcash ecosystem.