Sarah's story: from losing her savings to 23.79+ ZEC in shielded tips

General
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Some of you have probably seen @zooko’s thread about Sarah on X, the barista at his neighborhood coffee shop. If you haven’t, it’s worth reading in full:

Here’s the short version, and what’s happened since.

October 31

Zooko tipped Sarah in Zcash, the way he and others have for about five years. Then he shared what happened to her a couple of months earlier. Scammers who knew her name, her workplace, her boss and her Square account called her at work, said her boss had been arrested, and tricked her into emptying her account. Square couldn’t help her. Her bank couldn’t help her.

But they didn’t know she had Zcash. She sold some of her saved-up tips for the first time, paid her rent and refilled her bank account. Zooko ended the thread with three words that say it all: “Privacy is security.”

November 3

People asked how they could send Sarah a shielded welcome message and a tip, and Zooko shared her Zcash address.

That same day, the community launched a coin, $SARAH, on Sapling, with one rule: 3% of every trade goes to Sarah’s shielded address. Nobody holds the money in between. The fees collect in a pot that only the program controls, get converted to ZEC, and go straight to her shielded address. Before the first delivery, her address was checked character by character against the one Zooko posted.

The first delivery landed at 16:52 UTC: 1.354 ZEC, with a memo telling her where it came from. Within ten hours she had 20.37 ZEC across 19 deliveries.

Divij Pandya, Executive Director of PGP for Zcash, who works in Washington educating policymakers and regulators about Zcash, shared it and put it better than I could: a scam like this has no recourse, “And then Zcash entered the chat.” His post is here:

Yesterday Zooko asked everyone to go send Sarah a Shielded Encouragement Note:

Today

• 23.79 ZEC delivered to Sarah, about $29,000
• 55 shielded deliveries, roughly one every 15 minutes while people trade
• about 0.0005 ZEC per delivery in costs, and that’s it

Every delivery is public on the receipts page: the amount, the time, the transactions and the cost. Where the ZEC goes after it lands in her wallet is private, and that’s the point.

I think this is one of the best stories Zcash has right now. The people who scammed Sarah knew everything about her except the one thing that saved her. Now hundreds of strangers are helping her rebuild, and none of it can be frozen, reversed or used against her.

Thank you, Zooko, for telling her story, and thank you to everyone who has sent a note, traded, held or shared. The tips keep coming as long as people trade.

Full disclosure: I’m the founder of Sapling, and I wanted to share this story with every zcasher here. If you want to know more about Sapling, there’s a detailed topic about it here:

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Did she consent to the public story, the address being shared, and the $SARAH token with ongoing trade fees?

From what’s public, the original tips were private between Zooko and her on Zcash. That part fits the “privacy is security” point cleanly. Launching a named token and automated fee stream that keeps her story circulating is a separate project no one asked her about (as far as I can see).

Even with good intentions, that can matter. It turns a private recovery into a public fundraising narrative tied to her name and workplace, and creates an ongoing association she didn’t opt into. In a privacy community that usually treats consent as basic, it’s a bit awkward.

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This is yet another meme coin grift trying cash in on Zcash community and history.

There are many of these:

Scams unlimited - #10 by Shawn

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Fair question. Zooko shared her story publicly, posted her address himself, and asked everyone to send her shielded notes and tips:

$SARAH does the same thing, just automatically: part of each trade’s fee is sent to that address as a shielded tip. Nothing here goes beyond what Zooko shared. Her workplace is only “the neighborhood coffee shop” from his thread, and where the ZEC goes after it lands stays private.

She stays in control. Only the holder of that address can change where the fees go: she can send them elsewhere, hand them to the Zcash Foundation, or turn them off, and nobody else can, including us. If Sarah or Zooko would rather it work differently, it will.

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Also to add one thing: I don’t see how a coin sending tips is different from any person or group sending them. Zooko asked everyone to send Sarah shielded tips, and people did, one by one. A coin’s traders are just a group of people doing the same thing together, every 15 minutes. Same address, same shielded notes, same privacy once it lands.

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I’d push back on “grift”. A grift takes money from people. This sends money to Sarah, and you don’t have to trust me on that:

Every one of the 55 deliveries is there with its Zcash transaction: 23.79 ZEC so far, about $29,000, all to the shielded address Zooko posted. The 3% never touches my wallet or anyone else’s on the way. And only Sarah’s address can redirect it or switch it off.

Zooko asked everyone to send Sarah shielded tips. This is that, done by every trade, with a public receipt for each one. In two days it has sent her more ZEC than most donation drives raise, and it keeps going.

If you can find one ZEC of her 3% that went anywhere but Sarah, I’ll shut it down myself. Otherwise I think “grift” is the wrong word.

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And conveniently the coin appeared from nowhere to cash in on a trending Zcash story, where your platform takes a 10% fee while Sarah gets 3%.

How magnanimous of you.

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How is this private?

sarah has now received 20.37 $ZEC (~$25K)

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A few corrections, and the full picture so everyone reading has the facts.

You said the coin “appeared from nowhere to cash in on a trending Zcash story”. It didn’t. Zooko posted Sarah’s address and told everyone to send her shielded tips. $SARAH is people doing exactly that.

I also didn’t launch $SARAH. I’m the founder of Sapling, the launchpad it runs on. A community member deployed it after Zooko’s post and chose to send 3% to Sarah’s address. Anyone can launch a coin on Sapling and choose where its fees go: its holders, any Zcash wallet, or the Zcash Foundation.

“Your platform takes 10% while Sarah gets 3%” compares two different numbers. Sarah’s 3% is 3% of every trade. Sapling’s 10% is 10% of the fees Sapling collects, not of the trade. On every $100 traded in $SARAH, Sarah gets $3.00 and Sapling’s treasury gets $0.50. Sarah gets six times what Sapling keeps.

And the part you left out to make us look bad and you look right: the other 90% of every fee goes back to the community, all of it paid in ZEC.

Sapling didn’t appear for this story either. We’ve been building for Zcash for months, and in public every day since September 25, long before anyone heard of Sarah. Here is what that has meant for Zcash, all public at sapling.cash/stats:

• 35,255.8 ZEC traded ($45.68M). Every one of those trades was in ZEC: ZEC used as real money, every day.
• 10,580 holders and 495 coins launched. Thousands of people who came for a coin and now hold, trade and get paid in ZEC, many of them with their first Zcash wallet.
• 502.31 ZEC in fees ($641.2K), and 90% of it went back to the community, in ZEC:
• 173.70 ZEC ($222.0K) paid to holders, over 167,000 payouts, straight to their wallets
• 110.78 ZEC ($145.0K) spent buying back and burning $SAPLING, 22.56% of its supply gone
• 88.72 ZEC ($113.6K) added to $SAPLING/ZEC liquidity, LP burned, so it can never be pulled
• 18.92 ZEC ($24.9K) paid to deployers and payees
• 7.67 ZEC ($9.6K) sent to the Zcash Foundation from coins that chose it
• 37.24 ZEC ($48.1K) kept by Sapling, the 10%
• 23.79 ZEC ($29.1K) delivered to Sarah, shielded, in 55 deliveries, each with a receipt

Few projects in this ecosystem have put this much ZEC into the hands of Zcash users, or brought this many new people into Zcash. Here is what we shipped to do it:

Week 1
• Launch, with a ZEC vault under every coin and holder rewards paid in ZEC
• Stamps: a receipt of every payout written to Zcash mainnet, open source
• The first Solana to Zcash shielded asset twin on the ZSA testnet, open source, and a public demo of a Zcash shielded asset issued by a 2 of 3 FROST key
• Native ZEC in and out with Zodl or Noir
• Shielded stamps: receipts that land as shielded Zcash notes
• zcash-delivery-proof and zakura-bench open sourced; zakura-bench makes shielded proving up to 13x faster
• The vault program under a 2 of 3 multisig

Week 2
• Zcash-native accounts: sign in with Zodl or Noir, no other wallet, no other chain’s coin
• Shielded launches
• Coins that fund the Zcash Foundation, with the first donation delivered on October 5
• A public developer API, a DEX fund, and a way to fund a Zcash builder

Week 3
• Sapling v2, the whole site rebuilt
• Shielded payouts for every account
• Holder rewards anyone can verify with zero trust
• Tokenized stocks as pairs

Weeks 4 to 6
• Sapling Terminal: one ZEC balance, one-click trades, live charts
• A second chain: launch, buy and sell on Robinhood Chain from your Zcash wallet
• Raydium LaunchLab launches, with up to a 3% share to any Zcash wallet, which is what $SARAH uses
• New pairs, basket rewards, sigilcode support and a public changelog
• Cashback on the Terminal, paid in ZEC

The goal from day one: let anyone use any market from their own Zcash wallet, with every fee coming home in ZEC. Sarah’s coin is one small example of what that makes possible. Every number here can be checked on chain, and I’m happy to walk anyone through any of it.

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The amount sent is public on purpose. That’s the receipt, so anyone can check every ZEC reached her. What’s private is everything after that.

Sapling never shows her shielded/transparent zcash wallet. On chain, the coin holds only a sealed commitment to it, not the address itself, and the receipts page shows a shielded payee’s address only if the payee chooses to publish it. Each delivery’s Zcash transaction shows ZEC entering the shielded pool, not who received it. Her balance, her spending and the memo on each note are visible only to her.

So here’s an open challenge: using only what Sapling shows, without Zooko’s post, find her address, or follow a single ZEC after it lands. If you can, I’ll be the first to say so here.

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This is the part where, imho, consent matters most. Since the amounts are not private, they should opt in.

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If the amounts were private, nobody could check any of it. I could say we sent her $1M and you’d have to take my word for it. The public receipt is what stops anyone, us included, from lying about what she received. That’s the whole reason it exists.

And those amounts don’t say who she is. They’re tied to a coin, not to a person or an address. Zooko is the one who connected her name to that address, publicly, when he asked everyone to send her tips. Every person who tipped her after his post did it in the open too.

What stays private is what matters: her address, her balance, and everything she does with the ZEC.

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She was in public at a coffee shop correct? Please tell me you see the issue with this.

And zooko never leaked amounts to X! Its also on the Zcash chain, where it can stay shielded.

Bottom line for me, I think its great you are building cool ideas, but consent matters here. This could have been solved if you asked them before doing it.

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Fair, Zooko never posted amounts. But the fees are collected on a public chain, so the amounts are on chain whether we show them or not. Our receipts page just makes them readable and checkable. Hiding the page wouldn’t hide the numbers, it would only make them harder to verify.

I take the safety point seriously, she’s already been targeted once. But nothing public points to where she is: not the shop’s name, not the city, not her last name. Zooko’s thread didn’t share any of that, and neither have we.

And even if someone knew where she was, they couldn’t take it. That’s Zooko’s whole point: her ZEC is shielded in her own wallet, on her phone. It can’t be pulled out of a bank or a Square account like last time.

Still, you’re right that we don’t need to keep pushing her running total. We’ll stop posting her totals, and if Sarah or Zooko would rather the coin send its fees somewhere else, or stop, it will.

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Fair enough, and thanks for the kind words. I didn’t launch the coin, so I couldn’t ask before it happened, but I can ask now. I’ll reach out to @zooko so he can check with Sarah, and whatever she wants, the coin will follow.

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@zooko I’d love to reach you about this, but I can’t find a way to DM you anywhere. If you’re open to it, my X is igor (@igor_zs1) / X , or point me to whatever works for you.

I’d also love to show you what we’ve been building on Zcash since September: 35,255 ZEC traded ($45.68M), 10,580 holders, $641K in fees with 90% paid back to the community in ZEC, including $222K paid to holders. Whenever suits you.

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A foretaste of what ZSA’s could have been. Very glad we dodge that bullet.

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I support ZSA’s btw, they are not going away. NU8 will be fun! We need experimentation. In regards to igor’s work I’m just pointing out an area of improvement from where I sit.

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Appreciate that, and point taken. Same here on ZSAs: we built the first Solana to Zcash shielded asset twin on the ZSA testnet back in September, open source at saplingcash/zsa, and the plan is for Sapling coins to become native Zcash assets once ZSAs reach mainnet. Looking forward to NU8.

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