Good day all and welcome to the month of November 2023. Hope we are all doing great health-wise, family-wise and business-wise. We just celebrated the Zcash anniversary few days ago and thus I want to admonish us that the time has come for us all to advance the course of Zcash in our various location around the world. We must endeavor to move away from just talking the talk, to working the work. To this end, I want you to look at the “Taking Zcash To School” grant application via the link. Thank you.
Hi @ogasky - Thank you for submitting your grant proposal! We will review it in the upcoming weeks and reach out if we have any questions.
In the meantime, if you have any questions for us, you can post them to this thread or DM us at @ZcashGrants.
Zcash Community - We want to hear your feedback on this grant! You can post your comments to this thread or DM us at @ZcashGrants if you’d like to provide feedback in private.
Thanks!
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really cool grant. but im worried it wont get approved since its real big project and price of Zcash is not supportive for dis big investments atm. but yea, id love to see it happen.
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Acknowledged and thank you.
$576,000… is that a typo?
I’m 100% against this grant.
This would be better suited in the “minor” category.
@pkr, thank you for your response but if I may ask why are you against this grant proposal, cos I have seen several Zcash projects like wallets and others been funded and maintained with several hundreds of thousands dollars (USD). And funny enough how many persons are truly making use of these Zcash projects that are been heavily funded. Please and please let us all be objective and sentiment-free in our decisions on projects that will practically advance the Zcash protocol. Like I said and that I know, we will make Zcash popular and massively adopted in the Nigeria space cos we know what to do. We have done it before with some tech and blockchain brands, and it can still be done again and again. Thank you.
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@zerodartz duly noted.
There are endless reasons why the asking price and the actual proposal itself are outrageous:
Namely:
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Zcash has a spam problem (which is why it’s in limit-only mode on exchanges like Coinbase)
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Zcash doesn’t have enough funds to even pay its developers (ECC restructuring to better serve Zcash - Electric Coin Company)
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There is no shielded hardware wallet integration available (still)
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This is half of the grant of ZSAs(!!) and those aren’t even completed yet. Do you truly think you will be able to learn how to use ZSAs and put on a master class for it before they exist?
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Education of Zcash in its current form should be non-existent. It should just work
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Your points supporting your grant don’t align with reality:
I have discovered that so much is been spent on most of the Zcash related projects, and yet the adoption rate of the Zcash protocol is relatively very slow, and most especially in Nigeria that was one time the second largest crypto traded country in the world.
By volume, Nigeria is in no way the second largest country where crypto is traded.
You can imagine a world where we have an army of Zcash developers in Nigeria contributing massively towards advancing the Zcash protocol and its related projects at 5 times lesser the original amount it will cost the Zcash Foundation.
What if we set up “Taking Zcash To School” in Nigeria to raise up an army of 100 Zcash Developers within 12 months.
Exactly what would these 100s of devs even be contributing?
that will build more privacy related projects on the Zcash protocol as it affects peculiar challenges in Nigeria.
What “peculiar” challenges? Etc etc etc.
I can go on, but I’m not changing my mind on this. For a minor grant, maybe, sure, but even then, the exact execution strategy is extremely vague and riddled with buzzwords.
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Development isn’t the real problem with Zcash. This grant focused on that piece while ignoring user engagement, growth and adoption. If we are going to challenge the ZURE grant for $35k, then this shouldn’t even be in the conversation.
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@pkr responding in same sequence
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Is it not because there are no probably enough Zcash contributing Team, that is why the spam issue has not been addressed.
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Zcash not having funds, is quite fair enough.
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Still no enough competent hands to build it, if it is not existing.
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You said this is half the grant of Zcash Shielded Asset (ZSA) meaning about 1m USD, for your information we developers from Nigeria will build same and probably better than that for lesser than half that budget you just talked about.
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We are not just educating but converting web3 developers to Zcash developers, you must note that these people are already blockchain developers who can build wallet, create tokens, create SDKs and build IDE that other developers can use, but they just need to understand the Zcash protocol period, which will not take time & get them to solve some of the problems that has been dragging too long on the zcash ecosystem. They are coming to build projects on Zcash and get it adopted in Nigeria base on NIgeria peculiarity.
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My points align with reality, it is just that you don’t believe that most of Zcash challenges can be truly solved by developers from Nigeria.
7 I said Nigeria was once the second largest traded on crypto & that you can verified from the link below
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For your information, Zcash protocol should be seen far beyond just wallets and coin. I am happy that projects like the ZSA and FROST are coming up. However, from my understanding of other blockchain protocols that are doing extremely very well today, it may interest you to note that a lot of used cases projects are been built on these blockchain protocols which in one way or the other has improved on their value,
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I have listed some of these challenges before now, but however the truth is a payment solution can be built with zcash been integrated into it. Have you thought of cross border payments solution integrating zcash. Sir, I can give you so many because I know what I am saying.
In conclusion let us be open minded and sentiment-free towards advancing Zcash. Thank you
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@cryptomuncher, the user engagement was never ignored, please go through the entire grant application again, word by word. Thank you.
I totally agree with you!
I applaud and support your proposal. May it be approved.
Zcash you need more people to discover and try it, we need to inform and educate more about Zcash.
Regards.
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Agree, agree, agree!
Africa and Latam are a huge opportunity for Zcash adoption. That’s why we need people to be educated, educated and educated about Zcash.
@gordonesTV, thank you so much for saying the truth and for supporting this grant. I must state it here and now. The truth is Zcash need men and women with competence and capacity. We must not forget the challenges that Zcash is facing right now, and if we are not careful, some of our actions may lead Zcash to the grave, of which some of us would not want to see happen. Therefore it is fundamentally key, that Zcash at the moment need committed people with clear vision, people who know what to do, people who are strategic and can deliver on the task. Zcash need people who meant well for the ecosystem. Also, promoters of Zcash and the community should be open minded and award project grants based on credibility, competence and capacity. You can imagine several hundred of thousands of USD been awarded to build and maintain projects that are not onboarding users to the Zcash protocol. Now we are proposing a clear roadmap for Zcash to rise again and @pkr is been negative about it. Therefore, I call on the Zcash Community Grant Team to objectively look into this grant application without any form of sentiment but with the clear goal of bringing Zcash back to its original glory, irrespective of the geographical location that the solution is coming from. All that Zcash needs now is result and that result we will deliver from Nigeria. Thank you.
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Thankfully this isn’t going through a ZCAP vote…
I definitely appreciate the effort and the idea behind it, but I see 2 main issues:
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The definition of ‘zcash developer’ is vague. UI? UX? Protocol(mostly mathematicians with 3/4 yaers experience)? There are no solid metrics here.
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It’s too expensive
What I also agree with is that the proposals must be very clear, detailed and specific.
Because just as there are many people who do not understand cryptography and development, there are many others who do not understand the benefits and power of training and educating specific communities and user groups.
But if an educational proposal is correct and clearly explained and detailed, I don’t see why it can’t be approved and funded.
Definitely, we all need to open our minds in the global Zcash community.
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@Cris83 , thank you for your response and I will provide your answers in same sequence.
- I want to believe that you & I do understand the true meaning of a developer in the tech or blockchain space, and it was based on that assumption I used the word Zcash Developer, which simply mean someone writing out codes that will aid key activities on the Zcash protocol. These codes could be for a simple Zcash wallets development, Zcash users authentication, NFTs creation or NFTs Market Place, Issuing of Shielded Assets or any other token on the Zcash protocol. Also with these codes we could develop a Zcash GPT that will help audit other project codes on the Zcash Protocol, that is if we are thinking in that direction with an open mind. Again, I must say that over 60% of most blockchain projects are codes dependent and Zcash is not left out, so the developers support is key. Just for the records, a designer (UI or UX) is not the same as a developer (frontend, backend or full-stack), and that I am very much aware of. In addition to the fact that, there are some zcash projects that are currently dead due to the neglect of their codes upgrade or maintenance, while others that are lucky are currently been maintained.
Again, one of the major challenge for the Zcash ECC right now is developers. This is because the developers ideal salaries are quite high and too expensive to be sustained in this critical time of Zcash, but however the 100 Army of Zcash Developers we are trying to raise will help salvage the situation.
It key to note that in Nigeria, we have medical doctors who are blockchain developers, we have musicians that write codes, we have a 12 years old Nigerian kid developer with Amazon, we have a 19 years old kid that successfully launched a web3 cross border payment platform after leading the dev team of a blockchain organization in Germany for 3 years. So being a mathematician is not necessarily a must to code in the web2 or web3 spaces. What we are looking for are people who can give result, let us forget about this failed tradition of been a mathematician before one can code. For the record, i my humble self read mechanical engineering from the University. So let us forget about failed tradition and focus on who can add value to zcash at this critical moment, period!
- If it is too expensive to be funded, then we can scale it down to suit the budget that can be funded. For example, if the original plan was to raise an army of 100 Zcash developers, we can then scale it down to 50 or even 25 as the case may be. But we must not forget the impact that this project will give to the entire Zcash ecosystem which is not comparable to the amount of the present budget scope. Finally, we must not forget that the problem of Zcash at hand right now requires drastic measures with solid strategic solutions. Thank you.
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@ogasky Thank you for your submission. After consideration from @ZcashGrants and sufficient time for the community to provide feedback on the forum, the committee has decided to reject this proposal.
The committee appreciates your grant submission efforts and encourages you to continue as an active member of the Zcash community going forward, both here on the forum and in the below avenues as well:
- ZcashCommunity Discord
- Zcash Global Discord
- Zcash R&D Discord
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Acknowledged and thank you. However, I will like to state here that this project will be scale down to the bearest minimum & we hope that it may be considerably looked into. Thank you all once again for your time…