Retroactive Grant Application - ShapeShift

Community Grants Retroactive Grants
1

Hi all,

ShapeShift DAO’s Q4 retroactive application is up: Retroactive Grant Application - ShapeShift · Issue #102 · Financial-Privacy-Foundation/ZcashCoinholderGrantsProgram · GitHub

  • What ZEC users got: Ledger and Trezor signing, swaps on NEAR Intents and THORChain, ZEC in our public API and a widget you can pay from any wallet. 311 swaps with our referral on NEAR Intents and Maya (THORChain counted apart), $5.85M on the ZEC leg, 72% buying ZEC, each one checkable on the NEAR Intents explorer and Midgard (links in the issue).
  • Requested: $22,380 (Integration): 1.76 engineer-months at the DAO’s public rate ($30,800, at cost), minus $8,420 of ZCG#81 marketing money with no record of return
  • Work period: 7 Nov 2025 to 6 Nov 2026, all merged and public
  • Filed by me (gomesalexandre on GitHub, ShapeShift DAO engineer until March 2026, now at Vultisig) with @kaladinlight, who still contributes to ShapeShift. The grant is paid to ShapeShift DAO, which decides how to use it through its own governance. That could include paying either of us for this work, so count us as interested parties.

What’s in it

ZCG funded our node hosting and marketing (approved Sep 2025, paid Feb 2026, ZCG#81), with no engineering line. Its milestones (node, native wallet, Maya, testing, go-to-market) are left out at $0. This covers the engineering ZCG#81 didn’t:

The Ledger bit is probably the most useful to other teams. Ledger’s hw-app-btc hashes previous txids the Bitcoin way (double SHA-256), Zcash v5 uses ZIP-244, so the device signed a spend of an input that doesn’t exist and every send got rejected. We replaced that one function for Zcash inputs. That and the three other Ledger failures are written up in ZCASH_LEDGER_IMPLEMENTATION.md.

How it’s priced

1.76 engineer-months, about 305 hours, at the DAO’s own public senior rate of $17,500 a month (SCP-224), rebuilt package by package from public GitHub history: $30,800. Minus $8,420, the ZCG#81 marketing money ShapeShift said it would return (t/53818 #6); we found no record that it did.

Being upfront

  • Transparent only. Our wallets don’t hold shielded ZEC. You can pay the widget’s transparent deposit address from a shielded balance (tested with Zodl), and that’s as far as it goes. The 2025 “shielded transactions” headlines overstated it. Unified addresses are refused as a swap destination for now.
  • Upgrades. NU6.2, NU6.3 and NU7 were all fixed after activation, so each time sends failed until the fix shipped. NU7 activated on 6 Nov and we merged the fix the same day in web#12825. Mainnet sends after the fix: native 2676d2d3…, Ledger 771b5388…. web#12794 had warned us 11 days before activation. The application commits to shipping the next one before activation, which anyone can check against the height.
  • Fees. ShapeShift takes an affiliate fee on swaps, ZEC included: $34,866 to the DAO on ZEC swaps from 5 Dec 2025 to 6 Nov 2026. That is more than this ask. We don’t net the two: the fees fund the DAO across every chain, including the ZCG#81 milestone engineering it paid for itself, and this ask prices only engineering no grant covered.

Questions welcome here or on the issue.

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