Hey Al 
I believe the timeline setback points to the milestones for Arti: a pure-Rust Tor implementation for Zcash and beyond: Milestone 3 & 4 of 4 (1/1/22 & 1/26/22) being overdue.
Is this an administrative oversight? Has the Tor team finished the deliverables for the existing grant?
Additionally, as made public in the meeting minutes, the ZCG has asked ZF to review if they should fund the second grant.
Hey @aiyadt, thanks so much for your speedy reply. I’m going to check with our team and see what’s going on with the Milestones.
Aditya commented that it is important for network privacy; there are new developments to make the new stack work; he doesn’t see many replies on the forum but there are concerns when one grant is not finished;
What does the last sentence mean? Does it mean concerns about funding a new grant when the first is not finished? Thanks for your help. 
Yeah, there have been concerns brought by the previous committee about funding a team that has an ongoing grant. For @NighthawkApps , it has been resolved by confirming that different team members/developers would be working on the ongoing funded parallel projects.
This was 100% an administrative error. My sincerest apologies for the confusion. The milestone dates must have been entered into the Public Dashboard when the larger grant was initially proposed. They have been corrected to April 26, 2022 (milestone 3) and May 17, 2022 (milestone 4).
Gotcha, thanks!
Hi @Danika! We are following the milestone dates in our proposal here: Milestones · The Tor Project / Core / Arti · GitLab . The next milestone dates are 9/1/2022 and 10/1/2022. Please let me know where April 26, 2022 (milestone 3) and May 17, 2022 (milestone 4) so we can get in sync on this
Our standard process is to follow what is entered on our grant platform (see milestones dates and amounts at bottom). I am happy to change the dates on the dashboard if ZCG approves of these dates.
Regarding the Direct Grant option: unfortunately, this isn’t possible anymore under ZIP 1014. The language there was indeed:
the following mechanism MAY be used in perpetuity for some or all grantees, if agreed upon by both ECC and ZF before Network Upgrade 4 (Canopy) activation
To my knowledge, no such agreement was published prior to NU4 activation.
So offering a Direct Grant option would require a ZIP amendment and, in my opinion, a ZCAP ratification.
(Historically, there were financial/tax reasons for that time limit, but those are now moot.)
The Direct Grants section is a little confusing to me.
To clarify, your above interpretation is that since, to your knowledge, there was no formal “we agree” from ZF and ECC that in the future, after Canopy activates, grantees could be given direct block rewards, which are then activated/deactivated upon later, post-Canopy network upgrades, that this option is no longer possible without amendment, etc.?
I was sort of assuming that there must have been some implicit agreement between ZF and ECC to have had this section appear in the final ZIP. I notice that @amiller and @zooko are listed as the “owners” of the document, and there is a list of other credits as well (@aristarchus, @dontbeevil, @daira, @gtank, @acityinohio).
I was not around at the time, so to people familiar with the back and forth of ZIP 1014 at ECC and ZF back in the day: was there an explicit or implicit understanding (written, verbal, or otherwise) that ZF/ECC did indeed agree that Direct Grants may be possible for post-Canopy network upgrades?
Thanks in advance!
Yes, that’s my interpretation (as someone who happens to have authored that text, which originates in my draft ZIP 1012).
Context: ratification of ZIP 1014 predated NU4, and was necessary for finalizing the NU4 code. At that point in time, it was still unclear whether Direct Grant is desirable, since it depended on work-in-progress things like ECC’s ongoing transformation into a nonprofit, and ongoing legal consultation. So the idea was to nail down agreement on everything else via ZIP 1014, without getting blocked on that specific question — but also to timebox by when the decision has to be made.
Thank you for raising this issue @tromer. I will add it as an agenda item for our next ZCG meeting on May 31 to discuss how we want to prioritize a possible ZCAP ratification and ZIP 1014 amendment. I’ve spoken to ECC and ZF in the past about the Direct Grant Option (e.g. see Jack’s comments in the above meeting minutes), and both seem to be in favor of it, at least in theory, for certain long-term grant recipients. Hopefully we can get whatever support is needed to make this an option for future grant recipients.
Great. Personally, I’m also in favor.
Operationally: to implement Direct Grant we need to make sure that the procedure for deciding these frequent changes to consensus rules, and implementing them in the zcashd and zebra implementations, are feasible and clear.
@Danika I see. Did we (Tor) set the milestones in the grant platform? I am just trying to understand the process.
@bdavila yes, Tor set these milestone dates and amounts when they submitted the proposal to the committee and this is the proposal that was approved. I don’t want to speak for the committee but, in my experience sitting in on their meetings, they are very understanding that projects and timelines change and are open to working with grantees. Logistically speaking, this grant was submitted on our old grant platform that does not allow edits to be made once approved (our new platform is much more flexible in this regard) but we have a few workarounds to document approved changes that are made after a grant has been approved. I’m happy to walk through our process any time.
@Danika, I see, great! Yes, I’d like for you to walk me though the process. We’d like to change the milestone dates to 9/1/2022 and 10/1/2022.
@bdavila, great, I’ll send you a calendar invite so I can explain our process and answer any questions you have. Until then, the ZCG website is really helpful. @ZcashGrants do you approve changing the milestone dates for the Arti: a pure-Rust Tor implementation for Zcash and beyond grant to 9/1/2022 (milestone 3) and 10/1/2022 (milestone 4). You can like to approve.
Hello to everyone. Are the applications still going? I have a Turkish publication called zkApe, where I explain zero knowledge technologies. Zcash contents and updates have been published in the newsletter many times. and i think it’s still not understood how big of a work it is. I want to include more comprehensive zcash with grant.
here is zkApe links:
Are you asking about the Zcash Community Grants application? Yes, you can apply for grants at zcashgrants.org
If you’re asking specifically about the Global Ambassador program, refer to this:
Speaking as a ZIP editor:
Yes, my understanding is that the direct grant option would require a (straightforward) ZIP amendment and ZCAP ratification. Any consensus rule change, as this would be, also has to be agreed between ZF and ECC at the appropriate point in the upgrade cycle in order to be included.
It is not the case that the wording in ZIP 1014 precludes using the direct grant option just because ZF and ECC didn’t agree on it before Canopy activation. But that, and the fact that it affects the dev fund, is why it requires a ZCAP ratification. (If we were talking about a technical change to support a feature, say, it would still require ECC+ZF agreement but typically wouldn’t require a ratification.)