Retroactive Grant Application - Gleyo

[gilmore]

Gleyo - Coinholder Retroactive Grant Application (Q3 2026)

Ask: $9,081.20 USD
FPF Issue: Retroactive Grant Application - Gleyo · Issue #43 · Financial-Privacy-Foundation/ZcashCoinholderGrantsProgram · GitHub
Product: https://gleyo.app
Source: GitHub - gilmorre/gleyo-Zechub- · GitHub

What is Gleyo?
Gleyo is a Zcash-native community growth platform designed to help communities onboard and retain contributors through quests, engagement workflows, and ZEC rewards.
Instead of requiring newcomers to understand wallets and shielded transactions before participating, Gleyo allows communities to reward contributors in shielded ZEC as they participate.

What has shipped

• Gleyo launched on Zcash mainnet on July 14, 2026
• 38+ weekly active users in closed beta
• Real mainnet ZEC deposits, quest rewards, and shielded withdrawals
• Multi-token funding through USDT/USDC → ZEC conversion
• Production withdrawal architecture designed to safely handle concurrent community activity
• Full end-to-end compatibility with the Ironwood network upgrade
• Contributed an upstream fix to Nozy Wallet (PR #180) that restored Ironwood pool deposit compatibility
• Continued development and ecosystem testing following the ZecHub Hackathon

Ecosystem impact
Gleyo has been tested by members of the Zcash ecosystem, including Zcash Nigeria, ZecForge, and PGPZ, with ongoing discussions around using Gleyo for community and ambassador programs.
The project also contributes directly to the Gleyo GitHub: https://github.com/gilmorre/gleyo-Zechub-oader Zcash ecosystem through its integration with Nozy Wallet and upstream technical contributions.

Evidence & Links

• Nozy Wallet PR #180: fix: update route params to axum 0.8 syntax ({param} instead of :param) by gilmorre · Pull Request #180 · LEONINE-DAO/Nozy-wallet · GitHub

• Live application: https://gleyo.app

• ZecHub Hackathon submission: Update Gleyo hackathon submission with latest changes (multi-token of… by gilmorre · Pull Request #1874 · ZecHub/zechub · GitHub

• Gleyo Hackathon announcement: Introducing Gleyo, A ZEC-Native Quest & Community Growth Platform (ZecHub Hackathon 3.0)

• Gleyo Post-Hackathon Update: Gleyo, Post Hackathon Update 🚀

• Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Har9yk9Ep04

Grant
This application requests $9,081.20 ($9,000 compensation + $81.20 hosting/infrastructure) for completed work from November 2025 through August 2026.
The full proposal, including the detailed budget, impact evidence, technical architecture, and path toward self-sufficiency, is available in the FPF application on GitHub.

Happy to answer questions and provide additional evidence during the review period.

[gilmore]

Gleyo - Additional Progress Since Application

Since submitting the retroactive grant application, I’ve continued building and testing Gleyo and wanted to share a few additional signals from the past couple of weeks.

User growth and activity

Gleyo has now reached 43 registered users. More importantly, I’m starting to see more users actually going through the platform, completing quests, interacting with communities, and testing different flows.

Some of the newer users have also been giving direct feedback about wanting more quests and more things to do on the platform. That has pushed me to start creating and updating quests more regularly so there is a reason for users to keep coming back.

This has been particularly useful for validating one of Gleyo’s original goals: moving beyond simply acquiring users toward actually retaining and engaging them.

Growing interest from communities

I’m also seeing more interest from communities that want to explore using Gleyo for their own onboarding, quests, and engagement workflows.

This gives me an opportunity to test Gleyo across different community needs rather than building around a single use case.

There’s also something new coming soon around the onboarding and community growth side that I’ve been working heavily on recently.

Continued ecosystem support

I’ve continued receiving valuable feedback, testing, and encouragement from builders in the Zcash ecosystem, particularly within ZecHub. I’ve been able to work closely with @squirrel, @dismad, and @lowo88, whose feedback and discussions have helped me identify areas to improve and think more deeply about Gleyo’s direction.

What I’m learning

One of the biggest lessons from having real users is that shipping a feature is only the beginning. Seeing where users get confused, what they want to do next, and what brings them back has been giving me much stronger signals about what Gleyo needs to become.

I’ll continue sharing progress and evidence as development continues.

43 users today, more activity, more feedback, more quests, and more still to build.

[gilmore]

Gleyo Update: Early Community Traction and What We’re Learning From Onboarding

Since my retroactive grant application, Gleyo has continued to see meaningful traction as communities and new users begin using the platform.

Gleyo has now reached 155 users, and we are beginning to see activity move beyond testing into real community use.

One recent example is the Proof of Privacy community, which is now using Gleyo to onboard participants and run interactive quests around its Zcash education activities.

The platform has also continued generating conversations with other communities around how they could use Gleyo for onboarding, engagement, and participation. One piece of feedback from the Zcash Ghana Residency Program organiser was the idea of supporting coinholder voting directly on Gleyo. I implemented the functionality, and we plan to explore its use as the platform continues developing.

What we’re learning about onboarding

One of the most interesting things for me has been seeing how new users respond to educational quests.

Gleyo recently asked users to explain Zcash in simple terms, as if they were telling a friend. Some of the responses showed that participants were able to understand and communicate the core idea behind Zcash, particularly the combination of decentralized money and privacy, even when they had not yet developed a deep understanding of technical concepts such as shielded transactions.

For example, one participant described it as:

“Bitcoin focuses on being decentralized money; Zcash adds strong privacy to that idea.”

That is an important learning signal for Gleyo’s onboarding approach.

It suggests that newcomers do not necessarily need to understand every technical prerequisite before they can begin engaging with the Zcash ecosystem. Interactive quests can help users first understand the core value proposition, then progressively introduce deeper concepts as they continue participating.

This is the direction Gleyo was designed around: reducing the initial complexity of entering a new ecosystem while creating a path for users to learn more over time.

Current activity

Recent platform activity has included:

• 154 total users
• Active community onboarding through quests
• 302 quests started
• 281 quests completed
• A 93% completion rate across the current 7-day analytics view
• Growing community chat activity and participation

The most encouraging part is that these numbers are now being accompanied by real qualitative feedback and community use cases. Gleyo is increasingly helping me understand not only whether people complete onboarding flows, but also what they actually understand after completing them.

I will continue sharing updates as more communities onboard to Gleyo and use it to run real onboarding and engagement activities, while we gather more data around onboarding, engagement, and long-term retention.

X

[gilmore]

Gleyo Update - From Building to Seeing It Used

It’s been a while since I shared an update here.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty intense. A lot of my time has gone into working directly with communities, supporting programmes running on Gleyo, fixing things as they come up, and figuring out what Gleyo needs to become more useful beyond my own initial ideas for the product.

And honestly, the biggest change since my last update has been seeing Gleyo actually start to become part of how communities operate.

We’re now seeing communities use Gleyo for things like onboarding, education, developer programmes, quests, and community engagement.

That shift has been really encouraging.

Gleyo started as something I built during the ZecHub Hackathon because I thought there was a better way to help communities onboard and retain people.

Now I’m getting to see that idea tested in the real world.

Proof of Privacy

The recent Proof of Privacy campaign was another major milestone for Gleyo.

The campaign brought a significant number of people through the platform and generated 125 Zodl downloads associated with the campaign experience.

There were also a lot of useful things I learned from watching how participants actually used Gleyo throughout the campaign.

I’ll leave the full campaign results to the Proof of Privacy team when they publish their own update, but I’m really happy with what the campaign has shown from the Gleyo side.

Developer onboarding

We’re also seeing Gleyo being used in a completely different context through the Zcash Privacy Developers Residency in Ghana.

Participants are now using Gleyo for practical developer activities, moving from learning into actually completing tasks and submitting work.

This is particularly interesting to me because it shows that the same infrastructure can support different stages of someone’s journey into Zcash.

Someone can discover Zcash → learn about it → participate in a community → complete practical tasks → and eventually become a contributor.

That’s increasingly the direction I’m thinking about for Gleyo.

What’s changing for me

When I first started building Gleyo, most of the questions were:

“Can I build this?”

Now the questions are becoming:

“Can communities actually use this effectively?”

“Can someone who knows nothing about Zcash understand where to start?”

“Can we turn a new user into someone who keeps participating?”

“Can communities run their own programmes without needing me involved in every step?”

Those are much more interesting problems to solve.

And the answers are becoming clearer with every community that uses Gleyo.

There is still a lot to improve, especially around reliability, security, infrastructure, and making the platform easier for communities to operate independently.

But we’re getting much closer to the product I originally imagined.

Gleyo is no longer just something I’m building. It’s something people are starting to use.

Still early.

Still building.

More soon.

[gilmore]

Continuing the discussion from Retroactive Grant Application - Gleyo:

I wanted to share another quick update since my last post.

A lot has happened with Gleyo over the past few weeks, and I’m honestly really happy to see the progress.

Gleyo has now crossed 300 users.

More importantly, we’re seeing stronger signals that people and communities are finding different ways to use the platform rather than simply completing one-off quests.

Proof of Privacy

The full Proof of Privacy results are now available, and the numbers were honestly outstanding from the Gleyo side.

The campaign reached 239 users, with 1,091 quests started and 1,002 completed, giving us a 91.8% completion rate.

We also saw:

• 152 active users
• 54.12% 7-day retention
• 462 community messages
• 38 active community chat members

The campaign gave us one of the clearest examples so far of what Gleyo can do when a community has a real programme running through it.

What I found particularly encouraging was that some participants didn’t just complete the campaign and leave. Some went on to explore other parts of the Zcash ecosystem, contribute further, become ZEC holders, and tell us that they found the technology genuinely interesting.

That is exactly the kind of onboarding journey I originally hoped Gleyo could help create.

Regional communities

We’re also starting to see interest from regional Zcash communities and programmes in different ways.

The Zcash Privacy Developers Residency in Ghana is currently using Gleyo as part of the ongoing residency. Developers can use the platform to view their practical activities, complete the required work, and submit their work directly through Gleyo.

Zcash Developers Residency on Gleyo

We’re also now working more closely with , who have shared their requirements for running their community on Gleyo on a recurring basis, including using the platform to track their monthly Heat Index.

One of the workflows they requested was the ability to tip users directly in ZEC from the community chat, as well as the ability to give users XP directly from the chat. I’ve now added these capabilities to Gleyo, and we’re moving forward with the ZecForge team to work through their requirements and set up their community.

This is something I’m starting to really appreciate about building Gleyo.

I’m not always deciding beforehand what the platform should be used for.

Communities are coming with their own workflows and problems, and I’m building around those real requirements.

Gleyo is becoming more than quests

We’ve also continued expanding what communities can do directly inside Gleyo.

For example, community members can now:

Tip another user in ZEC directly from community chat

Give XP directly to users from community chat

These might seem like small features individually, but they’re part of a bigger direction for Gleyo.

The goal isn’t just to give communities a place to create quests.

It’s to give them infrastructure for participation, contribution, recognition and rewards.

More ecosystem interest

We’re also seeing increasing interest from other regional Zcash communities, wallets and projects.

Some communities are discussing how they could integrate Gleyo into their existing programmes, while wallets and other projects are exploring potential integrations and distribution opportunities.

That’s been one of the most encouraging parts of the past few weeks.

When I started building Gleyo, I was mostly trying to prove that I could build the product.

Now I’m getting to see communities and projects look at what we’ve built and bring us their own problems and use cases.

“This could solve something we’re trying to do.”

That’s a very different kind of validation.

A small milestone outside Zcash

Gleyo was also recently listed among the top 5 Creator Economy startups in Lagos for September on F6S.

Gleyo on F6S

It’s a small milestone, but I’m really happy to see Gleyo being recognized alongside other startups being built in Lagos.

Looking ahead

I’m honestly just grateful to see these adoption signals coming together.

Gleyo has gone from something I was building during the ZecHub Hackathon to something that has now crossed 300 users, supported real campaigns, been used by regional programmes, and is increasingly being approached by communities and projects with their own use cases.

There is still a lot to improve, especially around security, reliability, infrastructure and making the platform easier for communities to operate independently.

But the direction is becoming much clearer.

I’m very happy with the progress so far, and especially grateful to be building in the Zcash ecosystem.

Still early. Still building.

[Lowo88]

300 users lets goo!! Gleyo is very useful only make sense it getting attention community is the future of the crypto space. You nailed it dude!

[gilmore]

Thank you Lowo really appreciate it. It’s been crazy seeing how far Gleyo has come, and I’m really starting to see how big the community side of crypto can be. Still early, but we’re building

[gilmore]

It’s been a tough one on the infrastructure side. Our VPS running the Zcash node and wallet API went down unexpectedly, which meant shielded withdrawals on Gleyo were briefly unavailable. We moved quickly to get everything back online, rebuilt the node infrastructure, restored the wallet, and reconnected everything to Gleyo’s backend. Withdrawals are fully working again.

While we were in there, we also shipped two fixes that had been flagged by users:

• Fixed a withdrawal connectivity issue that was intermittently affecting the wallet infrastructure.
• Fixed transaction history to show the actual balance instead of an approximated one, so the numbers users see are now accurate.

Not the smoothest week, but we came out of it with more resilient infrastructure than we had going in, and two real bugs closed out along the way.

Now that things are stable again, we’re shifting focus to iterating on what we learned from the Proof of Privacy campaign, improving reliability, onboarding, and the edge cases that only show up once real communities are using the platform at scale. Our focus going forward is on improving the platform for communities and making Gleyo much easier for communities to use independently.

Still early, still building.