Victor Zscharnt for ZCG (June 2026)

[vic]

Why I’m Running

I’m Victor, putting my name forward for the Zcash Community Grants committee. I’m a crypto-native BD and growth operator with five years of experience building partnerships, communities, and distribution infrastructure across the industry. I care deeply about where Zcash is headed, and I want to put that operational experience to work for the ecosystem at a moment when it matters most.

Zcash at an Inflection Point

New teams, wallets, and applications are popping up at a pace we haven’t seen before. The right goal in this moment is clear: broader Zcash adoption, growth of the shielded pool, and tooling that makes ZEC easier to use for everyone. ZCG has a real role to play here: supporting builders just starting out, helping them bridge the gap from idea to sustainable project, and making sure the commercial side of development isn’t an afterthought.

With growing external attention, it matters that mission-critical projects can start up the right way within the ecosystem, aligned with its values. In a space full of loud opinions, the strongest signal Zcash can send is shipping real applications and use cases that prove it’s a serious alternative store of value. Price going up is nice, but projects show strength by executing on their expectations.

What I Bring

I spent two years as Business Development Manager at SideShift.ai, a non-custodial exchange infrastructure provider, where I managed 25+ integration partnerships with companies like Trezor, Bitcoin .com, Edge Wallet, and Cake Wallet. That role taught me how to evaluate partners, structure deals, hold teams to milestones, and tell the difference between a project that will deliver value and one that just looks good on paper.

Before that, I co-founded 0xHabitat, an open-source decentralized governance platform on Ethereum L2, where we raised $500k in grants and community funding and grew the community from zero to over 1,000 members. I’ve been on the grant-recipient side of the table and I know what it takes to scope a proposal honestly, hit milestones, and communicate transparently when things don’t go as planned.

Earlier, as Operations & Strategy Lead at LeapDAO, I supported a development team through a major technical pivot and managed stakeholder relations through that uncertainty.

I’ve been following Zcash closely for years, watching Tachyon develop, the Crosslink workshops, Zashi’s evolution to ZODL, and the steady momentum building across the wallet and integration layer. Not vocal in the forum until now, but engaged with the ecosystem and the questions it’s working through.

How I’d Evaluate Proposals

Two criteria would weigh heaviest in my evaluation: commercial sustainability, can this project survive beyond the grant or does it create permanent dependency, and clear, measurable milestones with shipped deliverables, not just activity reports. Discipline matters most when capital is easy. Rising prices mean more submissions chasing quick payoffs, and the evaluation bar should get stricter, not looser. I’d prioritize funding for applications, wallets, and UX improvements that lower the barrier to using shielded ZEC, and for integrations that expand Zcash’s reach across exchanges, wallets, and other crypto infrastructure. These are the layers where adoption is won or lost.

I’d evaluate every proposal on its merits rather than ideology, but I’ll be candid about my current technical leanings: pro-Crosslink for the hybrid PoW/PoS approach, supportive of keeping the transparent pool given its role in onboarding and exchange integration, store-of-value first with payments following, and skeptical that Zcash needs L2s when Tachyon could solve scaling natively. On ZSAs, I’m lukewarm. The regulatory risk on stablecoin assets and the opportunity cost of dev resources give me pause.

Conflicts, Commitment & Closing

I want to be upfront on conflicts of interest, because this matters: I have never received funding from ZCG, no project I’ve been involved with has, and I commit to not seeking ZCG funding for any project while serving on the committee. I currently work as an independent consultant with multiple crypto clients, none of which are in the Zcash ecosystem. If elected, I would scale back those commitments to give ZCG the attention the role deserves.

Beyond my professional experience, I bring a small but valuable network of builders, researchers, developers, and Zcash ecosystem voices. Part of ZCG’s role is connective tissue: helping new entrants find the right people, accelerating adoption through introductions, and creating testing grounds where projects can get early feedback. Not every grant needs more funding. Sometimes it needs the right connection at the right time.

If elected, I commit to showing up for every meeting, giving every proposal the thorough review it deserves, and being a hands-on resource for grantees. Not just evaluating their work, but helping them succeed.

Happy to answer any questions.

X | LinkedIn

[joyacehunter01]

Great to see candidates actively engaging with the Zcash community and sharing their vision so openly. Best of luck, Victor!

[valens]

Nice application Victor!

[ogasky]

Great profile. Goodluck

[CryptoEpoch]

You mentioned helping projects bridge the gap between an idea and a sustainable business.

In your view, what is the biggest reason crypto ecosystems struggle with that transition?

Is it usually a distribution problem, a product problem, or an incentive problem?

I’m curious because many ecosystems seem capable of funding builders, but far fewer seem capable of turning successful grants into long-term sustainable projects.

• Crypto Epoch

[vic]

Hey, thank you for the question!
It’s an incentive problem. Product and distribution are real, but usually downstream of it.

Grant funding rewards completing deliverables, not building something that lasts. Those aren’t the same endpoint, and the gap between them is where most projects die. A team can hit every milestone, ship exactly what was scoped, collect the final tranche, and still have no reason to exist the day the grant ends. The funding pointed at “did we deliver,” when survival depends on “does anyone need this enough to sustain it.”

Part of the fix is scoping that asks the sustainability question upfront. But part of it sits with builders, and that’s the part ecosystems tend to skip. Most builders scope around what they want to ship, not around who needs it enough to keep it alive. That’s a skill, and it can be developed.

A grants committee isn’t only a funding gate, it’s one of the few places that can push builders to think about the business side while they scope, instead of discovering it’s missing after the money’s spent.

Not everything should be a business. Some of the most important work has no revenue model and shouldn’t be forced into one, but it still has to be funded as that, deliberately, rather than funded once and left to a sustainability question no one planned for.

The difference between funding builders and funding things that last is whether anyone made the builder reckon with what happens after. That’s worth building into how grants get scoped, not bolted on once they’re failing.

[CryptoEpoch]

That’s a really interesting perspective.

The distinction between delivering something and sustaining something is probably one of the biggest blind spots in crypto.

It also makes me wonder whether communities should evaluate grants differently depending on their purpose.

For example, infrastructure, public goods, education, adoption, and community-building initiatives may never become businesses, yet they can still create long-term value for an ecosystem.

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether a project becomes self-sustaining, but whether it continues creating value after funding ends.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.