I’m standing for a seat on the Zcash Community Grants Committee under the pseudonym ShieldOrder.
My background is in strategy and risk assessment across multiple crypto ecosystems: stripping complex situations down to core trade-offs, enforcing standards that endure, and protecting finite resources from dilution. Zcash is unique: industrial-grade privacy, hard-capped supply, and a governance layer that either sharpens that edge or erodes it. After closely following the last several ZCG cycles (including the June 2025 election and the ongoing debates around grant hygiene, milestones, and regulatory risk), I believe the committee now needs an explicit focus on grant discipline, independent judgment, and treasury protection, without blowing up what already works.
Specifically, I’d push for:
Pre-funding filters tied to shielded adoption, infrastructure resilience, economic clarity, or governance hygiene
Mandatory milestones with measurable outcomes and explicit off-ramps (learning from past large grants that drifted)
Public rationales for every vote,yes or no, so ZCAP can see the reasoning in real time
I have no ties to ECC, ZF, FPF, or any current or past major grantee. I support the approved compensation level (10ZEC + $1,725/month) as it formalizes what the community is asking for: preparation, availability, and transparency. The role deserves professional-grade attention, and I’m prepared to deliver it.
I’m not here to relitigate personalities or past decisions, rather attempt to codify the lessons that have already been paid for. If you think ZCG benefits from a disciplined voice that has studied the history and is willing to say “no, for these reasons” when needed, I’d appreciate your consideration.
To keep things simple, any grant should run through three filters:
• Impact: Does it materially improve shielded usage, infrastructure reliability, or long-term protocol resilience?
• Clarity: Are the milestones concrete enough that progress or drift is obvious to everyone, not just the grantee?
• Alignment: Does the proposal sit inside Zcash’s core mission (privacy, sound economics, and self-custody)?
If elected, I’ll apply these filters consistently and share the rationale publicly on every vote.
I am grateful that you are approaching this process pseudonymously. I think that grants the community the privilege of focusing on your position-as-presented.
I understand that you claim a background in “multiple crypto ecosystems”, you also offer that you’ll bring “independent judgment”.
Can you explain how you judged your participation on other crypto ecosystems to be aligned with the core human right of individual autonomy?
Did you consider your previous work to be focused on improving the human condition?
Across ecosystems, my lens was always the same: does this increase or decrease the user’s ability to act without permission, surveillance, or dependency.
When something moved power away from the user or created new forms of capture, I stepped back. When it strengthened autonomy and reduced reliance on intermediaries, I engaged.
Zcash is one of the few projects that applies that principle at the protocol level. My Impact/ Clarity/ Alignment framework is just a way of enforcing that same standard on grants.
Any system that requires it hands someone; a regulator, a custodian, a dev team with upgrade keys, the ability to say no, to freeze, to demand identity, or to reverse.
Autonomy ends the moment someone else can intervene. Everything I engaged with had to minimize or eliminate those veto points. If it didn’t, I walked.
Consider that the lock-box is custodied by a 2-of-3 trusted signing regime, where each of Shielded Labs, The ECC, and The Zcash Foundation, have a key.
What if, for example, the coin holders voted to support an organization that the US state department deemed to be “terrorist”.. wouldn’t you agree that the key-holders in that case have a moral duty to veto the decision of the coin-holders?
Beyond a moral responsibility, don’t the ECC and Zcash Foundation as US-based tax-entities have a legal responsibility to veto financing anti-US orgs? Isn’t it a good thing that they have the power to veto a vote by inherently unaccountable ZEC holders?
A veto on user activity and a veto on a legally-encumbered treasury are different categories.
For users, any veto point is a coercive surface, it enables freezing, monitoring, or identity demands. That’s why the money layer must stay permissionless.
The Dev Fund slices and any future multisig mechanisms are not user vetoes. They’re issuance streams governed by pre-defined rules. The receiving entities already face legal constraints; if a disbursement would violate those, they refuse. That obligation is institutional, not protocol-level control over users.
My filters keep those domains strictly separate: zero tolerance for chokepoints on individual autonomy, and any institutional constraints kept narrow, explicit, and off the critical path of user flows.
Treasuries become legally encumbered the moment you route them through real-world entities. That isn’t a design preference, it’s a consequence of having boards, tax status, and jurisdiction. Law attaches automatically.
The design question is containment: keep those encumbrances narrow, explicit, and limited to the funds those entities administer. They should never bleed into protocol rules or user-level autonomy.
On devolving authority: I support structures that reduce single-jurisdiction dependency and expand the geographic and organizational distribution of responsibility, as long as they don’t create new chokepoints or off-chain dependencies. The goal is more resilience, not escape fantasies.
So in your view a sufficiently innovative approach to control of the treasury, e.g. pseudonymous entities of high-reputation, holding FROST shares, and communicating over Nym is a fantasy?
To me that stack seems imminently feasible… IFF there’s the vision to get us there.. hence this line of questioning.
Not a fantasy, just another design space with trade-offs.
Pseudonymous signers using FROST and Nym-style communication can reduce single-jurisdiction exposure and distribute responsibility more widely. That’s a real path, but it still has to meet the same filters as any other option:
Impact: it must materially reduce coercion risk on the treasury.
Clarity: setup, rotation, and recovery rules must be verifiable.
Alignment: no leakage of authority into the user money layer.
If an approach like that strengthens resilience without creating new chokepoints or off-chain dependencies, I’d support it. The goal is durability, not aesthetics.
And yes, it’s feasible. The question is not possibility but design discipline.
Impact is different because it’s probabilistic.
Clarity and Alignment are closer to binary: either the milestones are explicit or they aren’t; either the work serves the mission or it doesn’t.
Impact is a projection: if this ships as described, does it move anything that matters? When impact is unknowable, the question becomes scope and risk: is the downside bounded and is the upside meaningful enough to justify it?
So yes, it’s a different category. But “unknowable impact” isn’t an automatic, it just needs limited downside and no hidden dependencies.
Yes. Transparent deprecation only makes sense when the shielded path is reliable and low-friction. If you push deprecation before that, you create coercion by inconvenience.
Deprecation pressure without a mature shielded alternative sends people to the exits, not into the shielded pool. So the relationship is sequencing: strengthen shielded UX first, then remove transparent edges in a controlled way.
Done in the wrong order, it harms adoption; done in the right order, it accelerates it.
My view is that they’re orthogonal to the core. They don’t strengthen privacy, resilience, or autonomy, and they introduce congestion and incentive externalities Zcash wasn’t designed around.
I don’t oppose experimentation, but it shouldn’t distort priorities or consume resources meant for the shielded layer.
The highest-ROI spend right now is anything that makes the shielded path more reliable and less fragile. That means infrastructure: proving performance, wallet robustness, sync resilience, and the pieces that remove friction from everyday shielded use.
Everything else (adoption, outreach, new features) depends on that foundation. If the shielded flow isn’t dependable, nothing built on top of it compounds.
So the best ROI is strengthening the base layer of shielded usability and resilience. That’s where every downstream effect comes from.