ShieldOrder for ZCG (December 2025)

Governance ZCG Elections
41

Support ShieldOrder to bring good process and controls to ZCG

1 Like
42

Thank you to everyone who participated in the call.

For me the core priority remains the same. ZCG’s mandate is execution inside the ZIP defined model. Governance mechanisms may shift, but the committee’s responsibility should not. It is to evaluate proposals against clear, written criteria and to allocate resources in a way that is predictable, verifiable, and aligned with Zcash’s mission.

The 5 test framework and the proportional verification rule I outlined today are designed to strengthen that process without changing who votes or how decisions are made. They provide a consistent standard for Impact, Clarity, Alignment, Deliverability, and Verification and they give the community a reliable way to understand how treasury decisions are reached.

I appreciate the discussion and the work put in by all candidates. My focus stays on the process layer. Structure over personality. Measurable outputs over narrative. Execution that the community can audit and rely on.

ShieldOrder

2 Likes
43

ShieldOrder:

ZCG is a fiduciary body, not a gatekeeper. The community sets direction through proposals, forum discussion, and ZIP processes. My role is to surface tradeoffs clearly, enforce consistent standards, and protect long horizon funds for measurable user benefit.

Process is one form of legitimacy, but I think ZCG should be (as they are now) capital allocators that have real latitude and autonomy in decision making. Informal norms already exist and those are effective.

I like a lot of the buzzwords you use, but does ZCG really need more technocracy? A lot of written standards, process, and bureaucracy tends to negatively effect Performance. The aim should be to attract and elect high quality high performing people.

Now committee members are fairly compensated for their time (USD fixed base amount + 10 ZEC per month) so their self interest will help their decision making. If they allocate successfully over their year term, the ZEC token price rises. If not, the token goes down in value.

This will attract high quality high performing people. Such people don’t need a lot of process and bureaucracy.

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Coinholder voting is currently not production ready and a whale oligarchy
ZCG and Governance
44

Extra controls on large pots of money (and particularly crypto coins) is reasonable. But from what I have read, there are controls in place. It is preferable that there is some security through obscurity here.

Maybe you would consider talking directly with FPF, and after doxing yourself to them in confidence, and showing them your bona fides, could help audit their controls?

45

Thanks for raising this.

Autonomy and standards are not opposites. Any allocator that controls multi-year community funds needs both. Without clear criteria, discretion turns into unpredictability and the community loses visibility into why some proposals are supported and others are not.

If performance is the goal, it has to be measurable. Informal norms do not create that. They produce subjective decisions that cannot be compared from one cycle to the next, and they fail under rotation or stress. That is the point of having written criteria. They keep judgment consistent and legible to the community whose funds are being deployed.

The 5 tests I use are not abstractions. They are the minimum structure needed to connect intent to outcome: Impact, Clarity, Alignment, Deliverability, Verification. High performing builders and high performing evaluators both operate better when expectations are unambiguous and results can be verified without interpretation.

ZCG’s discretion is unchanged. The standards simply make that discretion accountable to the community that funds it. That is how fiduciary bodies maintain trust over time.

Standards apply uniformly to treasury custody regardless of who proposes them. Accountability mechanisms do not depend on personal identity. They stand/ or fall on their utility to the community.

46

There’s plenty of visibility. The fortnightly summaries - the Meeting Minutes are very specific - you can see exactly what each member said about the grants at each stage, and their reasoning.

I’m more concerned about the process for the Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program.
The coinholder voting itself is fairly transparent, but can a retroactive grant applicant understand why they were turned down?

Without some kind of text field explanation from the coinholders voting, how can they know what needs to be improved?

The FPF is soliciting comments. I think they could benefit from your input:

2 Likes
47

The Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program is run by FPF under its own process, so my focus remains on ZCG’s fiduciary role: applying defined criteria and verifiable standards to the grants within our scope.

Across the broader treasury surface, the principle is consistent: material long-horizon custody should carry a lightweight, mechanism-neutral verification signal that protects the community without altering decision authority.

48

I don’t mean any disrespect, but I just read a lot of nice sounding buzzwords again.

Can you be concrete and give a specific example of what you mean, applied to a real grant application.

Pick a single grant application (which you can find and track by reading Meeting Minutes) and explain in specific detail how your process would work.

1 Like
49

I think the framework I’ve outlined gives the community a clear sense of how I approach grant evaluation, so I’ll leave it at that for now to keep this thread focused on the core platform.

50

Since you asked for something concrete, I’ve already applied the same criteria in response to @artkor:

On a question you raised, Sprout deprecation ZCG Candidate Questions Thread - Post and Upvote! - #7 by vaspholdings , the same analytical approach applies: today the Sprout pool holds 25.6k ZEC (about 0.2 percent of supply) versus Sapling at 643k and Orchard at 4.1 million. The migration is effectively complete, and deprecation aligns with ZIP 2003, reduces maintenance cost, and eliminates a legacy attack surface once users have a clear window to migrate.

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ZCG Candidate Questions Thread - Post and Upvote!
51

Thank you.

If we had summaries like this at the top of each of the ZCG Meeting Minutes, certainly that would be a helpful improvement.

52

@ShieldOrder I’m interested to know what you think about this previous grant:

53

Thanks for surfacing this.

The intent was good, but the scope was nowhere near what’s required at today’s scale. A grant-tracking dashboard only adds value if it can reliably surface milestone drift, spending anomalies, and dependency risks without adding coordination overhead to ZCG itself.

The proposal you linked didn’t reach that bar.
The spec was mostly cosmetic: UI, alerts, GitHub sync, and a generic milestone tracker. Maybe useful as a component, but not a governance tool. It didn’t define verification primitives, define how spending categories would be standardized, or specify how ZCG could use the output to actually tighten decision-making. Without those elements, you get another surface to maintain, not a structural improvement.

What I’m arguing for is different in kind.

A real system has to anchor around three things:

  • Uniform structure for milestones so progress is legible without interpretation;
  • Separation of custody vs allocation so long-horizon funds can be verified cleanly; and
  • Process guarantees so the community can audit how decisions are made, not guess.

Anything short of that won’t effectively move the needle.

I’d support funding a proper dashboard that meets these requirements. But the submitted version wasn’t built to carry governance weight. At 9-figure scale, tools that don’t tighten discipline don’t reduce risk, they create it.

My position is simple:
If a system doesn’t help ZCG evaluate, verify, or correct course faster, it’s not solving the problem.
That’s the standard I apply to every proposal, including this one.

ShieldOrder

54

ZCG manages a 9-figure treasury across long-horizon funding channels.
At this scale, reliability is not optional. Coordination strain, ambiguous milestones, and unverifiable custody stop being operational noise. They determine whether Zcash compounds or slows.

ZCG does not define the mission or override community preference. Its role is to take the signals the community sends and relay them into clear, verifiable actions with minimal loss or ambiguity.

My approach has been consistent:
Impact. Clarity. Alignment. Deliverability. Verification.
One standard applied to every proposal. No drift. No improvisation. Reasoning the full community can inspect.

The same discipline applies to treasury safety.
When a custodian holds material funds over time, expectations should scale with exposure.
A lightweight audit or read-only balance proof for high-magnitude surfaces is not governance redesign. It is basic risk reduction for a treasury of this size, and it does not affect who decides or how.

This direction also reflects where cryptography is heading. Verification is moving closer to clients. Migration planning around new primitives shows that systems with structured, auditable decision processes remain sound through change. Privacy and verifiability together define the next decade, and ZCG can adopt the simplest and most effective parts of that trajectory now.

ZCG is the part of the governance surface where these improvements can be introduced cleanly, without changing mechanisms or ZIPs. The focus is straightforward: make the relay from community decision to actual treasury deployment as clear and lossless as possible.

Practical priorities:
• A single evaluation rubric for all proposals
• Milestones with explicit verification methods
• Custody expectations proportional to risk
• Transparent rationale for allocations

Forward and retroactive funding should ultimately feel coherent to the community.
Different mechanisms, same standards: clear reasoning, verifiable outcomes, safe handling of funds. As these practices mature inside ZCG, other teams can adopt what is useful on their own timeline.

The priority right now is simple: better evaluations, verifiable execution, and safer stewardship of the treasury today.

Approval voting allows you to support multiple candidates.
If you want one seat dedicated to disciplined execution and predictable, verifiable reasoning, add ShieldOrder to your approvals.

Clear criteria. Predictable reasoning. Custody expectations that hold under rotation and stress.
A process foundation Zcash can rely on.

ShieldOrder

2 Likes
55

You earn my vote, and I learn a lot to help me with my project and grant request reading this thread.

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56

Thanks for taking the time to say this. Clear criteria and a stable review structure help everyone involved, from applicants to the community members who track outcomes. If you want input when shaping scope or refining milestones for your work, feel free to tag me in the draft thread. Evaluation is predictable only when the criteria are visible and applied in the same way each time.

2 Likes
57

Thank you to everyone contributing to the technical and governance discussions this week.

My position remains the same. ZCG operates inside the funding and governance model defined by ZIPs. The role is evaluation and execution. The same written criteria apply to every proposal, independent of origin or timing.

The evaluation structure outlined earlier in this thread exists to keep decisions predictable. Impact, clarity of milestones, long-horizon alignment, deliverability, and verification through artifacts provide a stable filter when the broader environment is shifting.

As NU7 advances and new ZIPs shape the next phase of protocol and funding architecture, the surrounding landscape will continue to evolve. Recent work on fees, scaling, and syncing infrastructure shows how quickly operational assumptions can change. Through these shifts, what must stay constant is how ZCG assesses work. A stable and reliable process reduces coordination load and keeps progress on track even as technical roadmaps deepen and the ecosystem grows.

That is the lens I use and will continue to use.

58

I really like ShieldOrder’s reasoning and streamlined platform a lot.

Also, being pseudonymous is courageous, to come forward with ideas rather than (often stale or questionable or irrelevant) credentials.

The only thing I dislike about taking out the appeal to established personality is that IMO the most predictive thing for a person’s behavior is what that person has done in the past. It would be better if this nym had been around a while at least beating the drum for these thoughts for a while..

But overall I like this candidate, and I think they are probably worth a shot: FWIW, I tentatively endorse them.

1 Like
59

@aaal Appreciate the careful read.

I agree that past behavior is the strongest predictor, which is why I’ve tried to make the evaluation framework explicit and repeatable rather than tied to identity, credentials, or narrative.

If the criteria are clear and applied consistently, performance becomes observable over time. That’s the standard I hold myself to as well.

1 Like
60

I love it. Thank you for another thoughtful reply.

This really is not your problem to solve or address, but I was musing about what happens if you (or another presumably newer pseudonymous entity) were to simply misrepresent what they would do once they were imbued with organizational powers.

I don’t believe this is the case here, to me you come across as righteous. However, I don’t have a lot of evidence to back this up, so while my enthusiasm is high, my confidence level is lessened by the unknown.