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.

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