Below please find the latest @ZcashGrants meeting minutes and Public Dashboard link.
Attendance:
- Amber
- Brian
- Burns
- Jason
- Michael
- Alex Bornstein (ZF resource)
- Daniel Wolande (ZF resource)
- Deidra M acting as notetaker
Key Takeaways:
- Open Grant Proposals
- Bird Calls - This grant has been divided into two components and was partially approved.
- Simple Swap Service - ZCG rejected this proposal.
- Brainstorm Session Follow Ups
- Zcash Elastic Subnet Bridge on Avalanche - ZCG will meet with Kit on Friday.
- Global Ambassador Program - Welcome new ambassadors, Olek and Zecmec!
- RFP Idea Submission - Dan will contact the person who submitted the idea, of ways he can be involved with the current platforms.
- Qedit - ZCG had a call with the Qedit team last week.
- A Metamask-style browser extension for Zcash/ Zephyr - This proposal has been officially canceled.
- Trezor - The committee will ask Trezor if they would like to keep their grant open to move forward appropriately.
- Telegram bot - KYC - Jason asked about options for Jay to receive this retrospective payment.
Notes:
Open Grant Proposals
-
Birdcalls
- Jason outlined this grant. Birdcalls bills itself as an internet phone booth. It allows peer-to-peer, fully-encrypted video calls similar to Zoom. However, you don’t have to create an account to use it, and it’s completely private, similar to Jitsi. Birdcalls is a fork of Jitsi. They’re looking to implement Zcash as its native form of payment and will use BTCPay server for the integration. They’re asking for a total of $265,600, which breaks down to $200,000 for a senior developer for six months, $5,000 for audit and accounting, $60,000 for legal, and $600 to cover cloud server costs.
- During the last meeting, Jason said ZCG asked the applicant to break the grant into the exploratory and integration phases.
- The exploratory phase of the grant was posted to the forum by Sunny and would be $14,600 with a budgetary breakdown.
- During their brainstorming session, the committee discussed this portion of the grant, and Jason asked the committee to vote. Brian and Burns approved. Amber approved and added that she was excited by this application because it is both value-aligned to the privacy freedom community and uses Zcash. Michael said that although he voted to approve this part of the grant, he was not overly excited but hoped to be impressed with the larger part of the grant. Jason shared Amber’s excitement about the integration and voted to approve, but noted that funding an exploratory phase was something ZCG normally does not do for applicants; the burden is on the applicant to determine if they can complete the project. However, ZCG made an exception after speaking with Birdcalls because it was unclear how much work the integration required, and making that determination impacted the scope of work and the overall cost of the integration.
- This portion of the grant was approved.
- Dan asked what the best way to move forward would be since the entirety of the grant was not approved, but only this new portion of the proposal was approved. The committee decided to leave the current grant open in the gallery view and have the applicant submit a new grant proposal that the committee approved today. Dan will post the approved, edited version of the grant on the forum and will ask the applicant to resubmit a new, shorter proposal for the new portion.
- The committee also decided to leave the current grant open. Dan will approve it once that grant is submitted. Lastly, both grants will be in the gallery view.
-
Simple Swap Service
- Jason recapped this grant. This proposal is from Undercurrent for $52,500. The applicant wants to develop a chatbot that operates on Signal and provides a swap service between Bitcoin and Zcash. Users will be able to message the bot (operating under a standard US phone number) and provide Bitcoin or Zcash for swapping. The bot will have a simple Command Line Interface with a succinct tutorial for first-time users.
- This grant proposal was discussed during ZCG’s brainstorming session and was understood to be operating as an exchange that could have regulatory issues.
- The committee decided to reject this proposal.
Brainstorm Session Follow Ups
-
Zcash Elastic Subnet Bridge on Avalanche
- This forum post was discussed during the previous meeting. Dan contacted Kit to schedule a meeting between them and ZCG on Friday during the next brainstorming session. This discussion will include whether Kit should submit a formal grant, the scope of the project, and pricing.
- Global Ambassador Program
- ZCG will be onboarding two new ambassadors soon:
- Zecmec11, a British individual who lives in France, plans to use his property to host meetups focused on Zcash as well as possibly as a hacker house.
- Olek, a long-term Zcash community member, hosts a popular Italian Facebook group and will focus on Zcash and building a Zcash community.
- Both ambassadors have finished signing the agreements, so Jason will add them to the ambassador Signal group. Yoditar will announce this update to the community via the forum this week.
- With these additions, the GAP has 11 ambassadors, one over the soft cap. The committee will reassess the number of ambassadors in June when some agreements end.
- ZCG will be onboarding two new ambassadors soon:
- RFP Idea Submission
- This proposal was sent in Spanish. The idea is to “create a space for conversation between advanced Zcash users and the general audience with little knowledge about the platform in a pleasant way and in an easy-to-understand language.”
- Dan will respond to the person who posted this RFP and inform them of Discord and other ways for them to be involved.
- Dan reached out to them, pointed him to the Zcash Global Discord, and gave him Yoditar’s Discord and Twitter handles.
- Qedit
- ZCG had an exciting call with Qedit last week. The Qedit team disclosed their 2-year roadmap to take them to 2024. They are thinking about submitting a proposal shortly. More to come!
- A Metamask-style browser extension for Zcash/ Zephyr
- The committee wanted to memorialize what was already on the forum.
- This grant has been canceled after ZCG gave the grantee a week to update their timeline, plan, and milestones to no avail.
- Burns asked if the old grants platform could but officially closed now that this grant was canceled. Alex answered that all grantees have finally migrated to the new platform, and the old site will be decommissioned within the next few weeks.
- Trezor
- ZCG had a call with Trezor last week. Trezor reiterated that Zcash integration and finishing their milestone were not top priorities. However, they also said that they might reprioritize if Zcash went through a hype cycle and demand for Zcash dramatically increased.
- Brian is currently working on summarizing that call, getting it approved by the Trezor team, and posting it for community transparency.
- Trezor also said in the call that it was possible to implement support via a 3rd party wallet, so Burns will write up an RFP and post it to the forum in the next few weeks/months.
- Burns asked if this grant should be closed out. After some discussion, the committee decided they would ask Trezor if they wish to keep their proposal open or not. If they say yes, ZCG would ask if they could move the remaining milestones to Submittable. If they say no, ZCG will close the grant.
- Telegram bot - KYC
- This was a small grant, $700, approved by the committee in 2022. The purpose of this project is to kick out scammers with specific usernames. However, Jay wants to remain anonymous and not undergo ZF’s KYC process.
- As a Telegram community member and moderator, Jason asked ZF if he could volunteer to be Jay’s KYC angel, receive that retroactive payment in place of Jay, and then send Jay the payment.
- Alex said he would look into this ask and get back to the committee via Signal this week.