Workshop followup
Hey 
Zcash Community!
Thank you all for your incredible support of this workshop! I’m excited to report that the event was a tremendous success.
Results
We had a total in-person headcount of 14 dedicated students participate in our first session. The small group allowed for personalized attention and meaningful hands-on learning. Although more than this originally RSVP’ed, the drop-off in final attendance is not super unusual and it was still a promising group to start off with.
Numerous students had never touched cryptocurrency before, so to be on-boarded directly onto privacy-preserving options is a massive win.
Key Outcomes:
- 100% wallet setup success - Every participant left with a configured self-custody wallet. (Most acquired Zashi and/or Edge; there were also some people who already had wallets but didn’t have privacy coin support in them.)
- 100% transaction completion - All students successfully made their first Zcash transaction by receiving the funds we sent them.
- 75% advanced participation - Three-quarters of the class completed a currency swaps in Tor Browser via Trocador, demonstrating real confidence with the technology.
Real-world impact
The workshop revealed exactly why this education is so desperately needed in our communities. Several students shared that they had previously accepted Bitcoin from clients and customers but didn’t know what to do with it. They left the workshop knowing how to swap Bitcoin into ZEC for enhanced privacy, and how to off-ramp with either ZEC directly or to swap back into Bitcoin to new wallet addresses. (By discussing auto-rotation of shielded addresses in Zashi, students learned a lot about address clustering and why short transaction graphs out of exchanges help improve their privacy on transparent ledger systems.)
Even more importantly, multiple participants told us they had turned down clients and customers in the past because they didn’t know how to accept cryptocurrency payments. Now that they are equipped with practical knowledge, working wallets, and confidence in how to use these technologies in more private ways, these students can serve customers who prefer crypto payments, directly improving both their businesses and their financial lives. One participant literally told me, “I’ve always said no to clients who ask about cryptocurrency, but now I’ll say yes and ask for Zcash, or swap into it immediately if they only want to pay in Bitcoin.” This was probably my personal highlight of the entire workshop.
What’s next
Thanks to your generous funding for ~30 students, we’re excited to announce that we’re already looking at hosting a second workshop partly using the remaining resources from the first workshop, likely in about a month or two. (We will have more venue costs but are working out details of this for later.) This allows us to serve even more community members who need these critical financial privacy tools. This will also allow us to reach students who had RSVP’ed to the first workshop, but couldn’t actually make it.
Word of the workshop also spread surprisingly fast within this community, and so we’re also looking at partnering with other more established organizations in this space. No details on this are finalized but there is buzz. People who couldn’t make the first workshop but who heard about it have been contacting me via Signal in order to get pre-vetted to reserve their spot for the second. That’s a great sign.
It’s clear that the first workshop proved our methods work and that there’s genuine demand for practical cryptocurrency education in these marginalized communities where risks of being de-banked is a clear and ever present danger. Your support is directly translating into real people gaining real financial sovereignty in ways that materially empower their day-to-day working lives.
Gratitude
I want to be very loud about my gratitude, and I feel confident speaking as a proxy on behalf of those without the privilege of being as loud about this on the Internet as I can be about their gratitude, to everyone who contributed. The Zcash community’s commitment to privacy, education, and empowering vulnerable populations made this possible. You’re not just funding workshops, you’re really building the foundation for broader adoption by creating a vanguard of informed, dedicated, early adopters who understand why privacy matters and have their own established networks of colleagues and customers to evangelize the importance of financial privacy to.
Thank you for believing in me and supporting this community outreach work.