ROZO Merchant POS: Fast Zcash Payments for Merchants IRL - Grant Application

Community Grants
1

ROZO Merchant POS is a proposed Zcash-powered point-of-sale flow for native ZEC payments for merchants in-real-life (IRL).

GitHub Issue: Grant Application - Rozo Merchant POS: Fast Zcash Payments for Merchants IRL · Issue #336 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants · GitHub

Problem

The project is motivated by the complaint directly from the merchant IRL we work with.

Customer paid ZEC for the coffee (bridge to USDC via NEAR intents) believe the payment succeeded. But the merchant cannot confirm the USDC payment because they haven’t receive the notification on our POS.

That delay breaks the restaurant workflow. In a busy cafe, the cashier are impatient to wait several minutes, and they do not understand the underlying route. The ZEC customer is often embarrassed for few minutes. The result is confusion: the customer thinks they paid, the merchant cannot confirm it over the counter.

Proposal

ROZO Merchant POS will is optimized for native ZEC checkout path for merchants IRL:

rozo-zec-v2
rozo-zec-v21684×1294 183 KB

  • Merchant POS App handles the native ZEC QR payment
  • Fast transaction confirmation for micropayments through lightwalletd and mempool-level detection where appropriate.
  • Payment confirm within 10 seconds (p98 17s) logic for eligible orders under $1,000.

Rozo already has a POS payment app. In comparable retail-payment flows, our optimized path has reached P98 completion within 17 seconds. We confirm the payment in mempool and ROZO absorbs the risk.

Grant Scope

Request: $48,000
Timeline: July 2026 - September 2026

Deliverables:

  1. A merchant-facing product (POS app) that separates detected, retail-confirmed, finalized, and manual-review states.
    QR-based native ZEC payment requests for merchant orders.
  2. Fast transaction confirmation for micropayments through lightwalletd and mempool-level detection where appropriate.
  3. Instant-offer (p98 seconds level) logic for eligible orders under $1,000.
  4. A live pilot with 1-2 showcase merchants.

We’d love your feedbacks

  • Best practices for lightwalletd / mempool monitoring in a POS context
  • Small-value retail risk before final confirmation
  • Transparent-address pilot vs. shielded-first UX
  • Metrics the Zcash community would consider useful
1 Like
Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) Meeting Minutes 7/6/2026
2

Are you defaulting to Orchard shielded, or starting transparent and shielding after settlement?

2 Likes
3

We start with transparent ZEC for checkout to enable fast payment confirmation, without the 3-minute in-store waiting at the counter.

4

Thank you for submitting your proposal. Following a thorough review by the ZCG and a period for community feedback on the forum, the committee has decided not to move forward with this proposal.

We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you invested in your application and encourage you to stay involved and continue contributing to the Zcash community.

5

Thank you for the feedback! I think the concerns are fair around treating mempool detection as an early signal rather than confirmation.

We will make a smaller validation pilot with explicit risk caps, prefunded liquidity, and measured outcomes such as detection latency, confirmation rate, default rate, fee willingness, repeat usage, and traction for digital services or merchant checkout.