Below please find the latest ZCG meeting minutes and Public Dashboard link.
Attendance:
- Amber
- Brian
- GGuy
- Jason
- Michael
- Alex (ZF resource)
- Jack (ZF resource)
- Deidra M (notetaker)
Key Takeaways:
- Pacu’s message to Jack - Jack and ZCG discussed a need for additional engineering resources to assist with upstreaming work with active grants.
- Open Grant Proposals
- Board Game: Crypto Trader - Zcash Edition - This grant will remain open as follow-up is needed.
- Coin Voting 2.0 - This grant will remain open until discussed at the next Arborist Call.
- Wordpress Plugin for Embedding dApps - This grant was rejected.
- Upstream Enhancements to librustzcash - This grant was approved.
- Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups
- GitHub Migration - GGuy provided an update on ZCG’s transition to GitHub for their grants application system.
- Membrane Finance - Jason contacted the Equilibrium Group for a Euro-E stablecoin for Zcash.
- Community Grant Punchlist - The committee discussed a forum request for a more straightforward view of active grant statuses.
Pacu’s message to Jack
- Pacu sent Jack a message in response to the Upstream Enhancement grant from Chainsafe. There is a need for additional engineering resources to help upkeep specific grants. Pacu asked if ZF would be interested in having a designated person or persons who would help in long-term maintenance with active grants in upstreaming work moving forward.
- Some ideas to help answer this idea/question from Jack and ZCG were:
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- Creating an RFP for the community to provide aid when necessary.
- The challenge with this approach would be carefully evaluating the maintenance requirements for each grant because they would be different. Therefore, only a few people have the bandwidth to handle the various complexities.
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- Hire outside developers/engineers.
- Onboarding new engineers could be time-consuming for current engineers, making the project take longer.
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- Adding a question to the grant application form about whether the grant will require future support and maintenance.
- The application currently has a similar language, so this approach may be ineffective.
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- The best people to work on a grant upstream are those who have written it, so open conversations with grant recipient leaders about long-term maintenance responsibilities should be stressed before approval.
- The challenge here is that sometimes it is difficult for teams to foresee necessary upstream work/changes.
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- No answer was set in stone as this is very situationally dependent.
Open Grant Proposals
- Board Game: Crypto Trader - Zcash Edition - The proposal requests a grant of 140 ZEC (approximately $5,000) to develop a board game titled “Crypto Trader: Zcash Edition,” aimed at educating players about trading crypto and the privacy features of Zcash. The game will engage 2-6 players in managing resources, securing transactions, and avoiding digital threats while promoting awareness of Zcash’s unique benefits. The project is expected to be completed within 6-12 weeks, with a total of 100 high-quality copies produced for distribution to community members.
- The update is that this team is working on getting funding from other sources like Free2Z, ZecHub, or elsewhere, so this grant will remain open.
- Coin Voting 2.0 - Jason gave background on this grant. This proposal is from Hanh, who is asking for $200,000 to develop a Coin Voting system utilizing Orchard funds for governance, airdrops, and balance proofs while maintaining privacy through shielded Zcash transactions. The solution will leverage Orchard notes and Halo 2 to implement a voting mechanism where users can vote without moving their funds, ensuring their balance remains private. The project includes the development of a voting server, client, and integration with Ywallet, as well as tools for vote validation, block production, and audit. The work will be completed over several milestones, with an initial focus on a prototype and core voting functionality, followed by full circuit integration and RPC tools.
- The committee discussed this in their latest brainstorm session and will bring this grant up during the next Arborist Call to ensure that the core developers have an opportunity to review the grant proposal.
- Wordpress Plugin for Embedding dApps - Jason summarized this grant. This proposal requests $6,500 to develop a WordPress plugin that embeds decentralized applications (dApps) into WordPress websites, allowing users to interact with blockchain solutions directly on the site. The plugin will include integration with the Zcash network, enabling seamless interaction with dApps without requiring technical expertise. The project will involve design, development, testing, and marketing to ensure wide adoption and user engagement.
- ZCG discussed this during their last brainstorm meeting and unanimously voted to reject this proposal.
- Upstream Enhancements to librustzcash - Jason gave background on this grant. ChainSafe Systems requests $16,800 for upstream enhancements to the librustzcash codebase, specifically the memory wallet backend. This project involves merging a custom memory backend and related changes into the official librustzcash fork to improve its functionality for WebZjs, a JavaScript library for Zcash. The deliverables include a completed code refactor and successful integration after code review, with minimal risks as the components are already functional separately.
- The committee unanimously voted to approve this grant.
- Reporting frequency will be monthly and categorized as integration for the records.
- Brian brought up that ZCG is open to and exploring funding an audit of this grant. The audit will be discussed further at ZCG’s next brainstorm session.
- The committee unanimously voted to approve this grant.
Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups
- GitHub Migration - GGuy gave an update on the GitHub migration. He said he is continuing to make progress on that front. He is working on replicating grants and additional admin boards from the ZCG dashboard.
- Membrane Finance - Jason reached out to the Equilibrium Group (parent of Membrane Finance) to set up a call with Membrane Finance to encourage them to research the regulatory and technical feasibility for creating a EUROe stablecoin for Zcash. The team is currently preoccupied with other projects, but they said they may be able to focus on Zcash in the first quarter of 2025. Jason will continue to follow up on this.
- Community Grant Punchlist - Zkcroc from the forum posted their request for a punch list of active grants and smaller milestones to be created because it is currently challenging to follow.
- GGuy said this new functionality could be incorporated into the new grants landing page on GitHub. He will respond to zkcroc.