Hi Zcash Community Forum,
My name is Sunny and I run a startup called Birdcalls. We make privacy-focused video conferencing tools to suit the needs of professionals.
We’ve been lurking here for a while but didn’t actually create our account until today to submit this grant application - please forgive our newness! As a company that believes privacy is essential for digital society, we hope to be valuable contributors to this community in the future. Here’s our grant application, please take a look through it to learn more about who we are. We’re looking forward to answering questions and starting this conversation.
Also - you’re warmly welcomed to check out our video conferencing service, via the links below! We always welcome harsh criticisms, strong opinions, and feature requests. The main call reservation system will be payment-walled in the next few days, but both peer-to-peer phone booths will stay free.
Anonymous Internet Phone Booth [Anti-screenshot toggle on, requires our app on phones] [see comments for link, link removed for community first post guidelines]
The Internet Phone Booth [Anti-screenshot toggle off, can use laptop browsers] [see comments for link, link removed for community first post guidelines]
Best,
Sunny Allen
Title:
Zcash-based secure payment infrastructure for a privacy-focused video-conferencing service
Applicant Name:
BirdCalls
One Line Elevator Pitch For Our Proposal (140 characters):
Zcash-based secure payment infrastructure for privacy-focused video-conferencing service, w/ associated education pages for Zcash community
Total Request (USD):
265,600
Applicant Background:
BirdCalls is a diverse team of industry veterans with a combined 86+ years of technically relevant software experience, 25+ years financial experience, and 30+ years branding and marketing experience. As a team, we follow ‘Lapsed Anarchist’ Business principles. To us, this means we care deeply about open-source, but pragmatically we also care about making money to keep ourselves fed and housed, and our investors happy. This also means that we function by setting up a vision together of where the company is headed, agreeing on our corporate values, and then leaving each individual the freedom to decide their own path to get there. BirdCalls is a privacy-first company. This means we collect as little information as we can about our users, and we keep the identities of some of our own staff private as well.
Sunny Allen is a serial entrepreneur with 10+ years managing software projects (and whipping up a shell script when needed) along with 15+ years branding, marketing, and entrepreneurial project management experience. Open source, biotech, sensor frameworks. [see link to linkedin in comments, link stripped for community first post guidelines]
Dr. Aeron Tynes Hammack is a scientist and software engineer with 25+ years programming and systems architecture experience, with a focus on quantum computing physics and bioinformatics as well as copious amounts of entrepreneurial experience. [see link to linkedin in comments, link stripped for community first post guidelines]
The Architect is a software designer with 32+ years programming experience. They are a pragmatic street smarts privacy and security professional who has built a custom bitcoin payment system using the bitcoin core API on the company’s own hardware (for a previous company).
The Banker is a finance expert with 25+ years experience in international finance and lending with bulge bracket and boutique investment banks, as well as asset management firms.
████ is a software architect with 25+ years programming experience, who is so obsessed with privacy that it’s almost impossible to work with him, we never know where he is, and only one of us even knows his real name. What other kind of personality would we want in this role?
Pattie is a brand architect and creative writer focusing on marketing strategies for startups and feminist business practices. She has 12 years of experience in small business building across the travel, tech, and chemical industries.
Make a free two-person call at:
The Internet Phone Booth [see link in comments, link stripped for new community post guidelines]
Unlock full paid calling capabilities at:
[see link in comments, link stripped for new community post guidelines]
Our main site for more information:
[see link in comments, link stripped for new community post guidelines]
Our Gitlab:
[see link in comments, link stripped for new community post guidelines]
Description of Problem or Opportunity:
It’s easy for a cryptocurrency to function as a speculative investment vehicle. It’s harder for a cryptocurrency to become a real currency in society. We believe that a currency becomes real when you can use that currency to pay for the basic goods and services of daily life: food, rent, utilities, communications, and entertainment.
Here at Birdcalls, we’re focusing on re-building basic communication services for society on the internet, this time with a foundational focus on privacy. Right now, all our payments go through Stripe, which is obviously not ideal from a privacy perspective. To further our privacy-as-a-given value system, we’d love to integrate a Zcash payment processing system onto our platform. And in the process, help improve Zcash’s basic utility as a real currency.
We’ve made the internet’s phone booth. Now we want to add the phone booth’s coin slot! We’d love to partner with Zcash to do so.
Also! As a company, Birdcalls values giving as well as taking. To give back to the Zcash community as a whole, we’d like to make it easier for other internet companies to integrate Zcash payment processing systems in the future. We’ll structure our integration so that we’re building on existing Zcash community documentation efforts.
Proposed Solution: Describe the solution at a high level:
The users and stakeholders for our payment system integration are: people making private calls on the internet who want to be able to pay for the service using privacy-focused currency.
The users and stakeholders for our educational materials are: other internet businesses who want to integrate Zcash payment processing systems in the future.
Solution Format: What is the exact form of the final deliverable you’re creating?
Our final deliverable for our company’s needs will be: a payment processing system for Birdcalls [see link in comments, link stripped for community first post guidelines] where users can pay for our service via Zcash
Our final deliverable for Zcash community education will be: documentation describing how to integrate this Zcash-enabled payment processing system into other sites.
Technical Approach: Dive into the how of your project. Describe your approaches, components, workflows, methodology, etc. Bullet points and diagrams are appreciated!
How we will build the payment portal for our company’s needs
Here’s how we would normally build a payment processing system like this:
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Run a separated server
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Which is connected to internet only via tor
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Each transaction reconnects to a new tor circuit to avoid transaction grouping / profiling
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So there’s no way to tie the transactions together
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Birdcalls’s Zcash public hierarchical key goes to the web server
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When someone wants to pay for something the web server uses the hierarchical public key to generate a unique address to that user and that transaction
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The zcash server sits and watches for new transactions, when an address it knows about receives funds, a signed postback is made to the web server to notify it that a payment of a certain value has been deposited to that address
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Then pings the web server and says here’s the received address amount
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Web server can then look up the account / transaction that this address was assigned to and mark it as paid
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User is then notified that their payment has been received
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Every transaction gets a new address
But, we did our research! We discovered that the Zcash community has already funded a Zcash integration for btcpay. We’ll want to assess further, but we think that this integration should be sufficient for our needs. Thus, our new set of steps will be:
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Assess the btcpay Zcash integration
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Set up btcpay Zcash integration
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Configure btcpay Zcash integration
To Add To Zcash Community Educational Materials:
So that it’s easier for other online businesses to integrate Zcash payments in the future, here’s how we’ll contribute to the Zcash ecosystem:
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Take the existing Zcash functionality that’s already been added to btcpay
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Make sure it still works
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If it doesn’t work, we’ll fix it
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Create documentation for it, in the same way that other alt coins are documented (c.f. https://docs.btcpayserver.org/FAQ/Altcoin/#which-coins-does-btcpay-server-support)
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Including a proper written setup guide
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A proper written config guide
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Set up the documentation as a GitHub repository that anyone can contribute to
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We’ll maintain the documentation repository for at least 1 year
Dependencies: What external entities is your project dependent on? What involvement is required from ZF, ECC, and/or other external organizations? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?
None. If the existing btcpay option can’t be integrated, we have the skillset and are prepared to build it ourselves.
Execution risks: What obstacles do you expect? What is most likely to go wrong? Which unknown factors could jeopardize success? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?
One of our developers has already set up a bitcoin payment server in the manner described above (Technical Approach Section) so he’s not particularly worried about his ability to execute this set of tasks. It just takes time.
Unintended Consequences: What are the negative ramifications if your project is successful? Consider usability, stability, privacy, integrity, availability, decentralization, interoperability, maintainability, technical debt, requisite education, etc.
Additional customer support resources and public facing documentation will be required to support customers paying with zcash. Basically, unless we’re careful, supporting Zcash payments could actually cost us more money than it makes us. Which could lead to a problem with the whole paying-for-the-roofs-over-our-heads thing.
Evaluation plan: What metrics for success will you share with the community once you’re done? In addition to quantitative metrics, what qualitative metrics will you commit to report?
Quantitative:
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the percentage of payments that are run through zcash vs through traditional payment methods
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the percentage of user growth attributable to the addition of zcash payment processing system adoption
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the percentage of users who click on the zcash payment option for info, vs the percentage of people who actually complete a zcash transaction
Qualitative:
Zcash name recognition outside of security-focused channels and raising the bar of community expectations for safety and security from digital communication companies
Hardware/Software total budget:
$0
Services total budget (cloud, hosting, etc.):
$600
- New cloud server $50/month x 12 months = $600
Compensation total budget:
$265000
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1 Headcount / senior developer 6 months build and maintain = $200,000
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Audit & accounting = $5,000
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Legal = $60,000
Do you require startup funding?
Yes, $75,000
We need to have cash allocated in the bank in order for our developer to start these first tasks:
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Assessment of existing btcpay zcash module
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Integration of btcpay with zcash into our payment system
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Zcash payment processing system tested and validated on demo server
We need to pay a lawyer some costs up front:
- Legal startup fees so we know how to appropriately structure payment entity before private payments go live
Milestone 1 - estimated completion date:
7/03/2023
$85000
Deliverable 1.1:
- Zcash payment processing system tested and validated on demo server
Deliverable 1.2:
- Packet of documents delivered by legal for structuring of a regulatory-compliant entity to accept private payments
Milestone 2
10/02/2023
$100,000
Deliverable 2.1:
BirdCalls Zcash payment processing system live
Milestone 3:
03/01/2024
$5,000
Deliverable 3.1:
Accounting audit
How was the project timeline determined?
Allocation of resources of our developers’ time on this versus other internal projects, along with sufficient time to ramp up and iterate on customer adoption strategies.
How did you learn about Zcash Community Grants?
Zooko told us about it!
's ! Created an account and will take a look! 
and a symbol of transparency. Try doing something that creates an error message, like typo your password, and you’ll see that displayed in the console log too.
