Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 8/21/23

[decentralistdan]

Below please find the latest ZCG meeting minutes and Public Dashboard link.

Zcash Community Grants Dashboard

Attendance:

• Amber
• Brian
• GGuy
• Jason
• Michael
• Jack (ZF resource)
• Daniel (ZF resource)
• Deidra M (notetaker)

Key Takeaways:

• Open Grant Proposals

• Bird Calls - This grant remained on hold.

• Charity Impact - This proposal was rejected.

• UniFFI Library Addenda - ZCG voted to approve this grant.

• Lwd.fail: A Lightwallet Server List - The committee voted to reject this grant proposal.

• Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups

  • Ogaga Onose: Zcash Academy in Nigeria - Ogaga emailed ZCG about a new grant proposal.
  • Pacu: LCWG - Pacu asked for a Zoom account.

Open Grant Proposals

• Bird Calls - Formally posted the second phase of the project, the integration phase, asking for $245,600. They think it will take a significant amount of work to integrate BTCpay into Birdcalls. At the 05/29 meeting, the committee voted to put Birdcalls on “hold.”.

  • No change. The committee will leave this grant proposal as an open agenda item and revisit it in future meetings.

• Charity Impact - Jason gave background to this proposal. Charity Impact provides a multichain platform for individuals and companies to donate globally to nonprofit organizations (NPO) in both fiat and cryptocurrencies. This platform aims to empower the worldwide charity network through decentralized finance. They are asking for $17,000 USD for two developers and support through the integration process, which would be split over three milestones.

  • ZCG spoke about this grant last week and voted to reject it.
  • Dan will send a standard rejection notification.

• UniFFI Library Addenda - Jason recused himself from voting as he has a conflict of interest with Eiger but gave background for this resubmitted proposal. The committee rejected it at the 5/25 meeting, citing that ZCG wanted the UniFFI team to finish their original grant and demonstrate that the UniFFI Library is something that the Zcash community can easily use. Eiger completed Milestone 5 of the previous grant, Zcash UniFFI LIbrary, and re-submitted a second proposal. That proposal was approved at the 7/24 meeting with two milestones; however, following conversations at Zcon4, synchronization was added to it. The UniFFI team withdrew that grant and resubmitted it with a 3rd milestone and is asking for $144,000 to:

  • (1) move the UniFFI-supported library closer to the original library
  • (2) create a small demo of a wallet showcasing how to use this library on Android
  • (3) sync
  • The committee unanimously voted to approve this grant proposal.
  • This grantee will be required to provide updates/reports on a milestone basis and a demo after completing the second and third milestones.

• Lwd.fail: A Lightwallet Server List - Jason summarized this proposal. This small grant asks for $900 to provide a public list of lightwalletd servers with status and other useful information.

  • The committee, by a 3 to 2 vote, decided to forward the applicant to the next round of the Minor Grants program instead of granting immediate approval.

Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups

• Ogaga Onose: Zcash Academy in Nigeria

  • This community member sent an email to ZCG asking for advice on if he should apply for this grant. He gave a summary of what Zcash Academy in Nigeria would be.
  • The committee voted to reject this idea for the following reasons:
    • Not the right time, given the market
    • Not a priority and out of scope
    • Perhaps a smaller, more specific grant objective would be better to start with for this team
  • Although the committee recognizes that Nigeria has a significant crypto and tech-savvy population, ZCG voted to reject this proposal and redirect the applicant to the Minor Grants Program.
  • Currently, ZCG has a Nigerian Ambassador that does educational events in the region about Zcash.

• Pacu: LCWG

  • Pacu sent a message to ZCG this week asking to start the Light Client Working Group again, requiring a Zoom account. ZCG does not have a Zoom account, but ZF does.
  • Jack said ZF will offer the ZF Zoom account to him if Pacu is okay with that. Jason will let Pacu know this week.

Miscellaneous

• Statement from ZCG
  • The committee met on Friday and spoke about the price of Zcash. ZCG will be very cautious about how they will spend money and future funding of grants. If the price continues to deteriorate they are also considering suspending specific programs until the price improves. This is not an immediate or concrete decision, but this may be an option. They will also look at underperforming grants to cancel them or cut back in other areas.

[noamchom]

@decentralistdan

Statement from ZCG

The committee met on Friday and spoke about the price of Zcash. ZCG will be very cautious about how they will spend money and future funding of grants. If the price continues to deteriorate they are also considering suspending specific programs until the price improves. This is not an immediate or concrete decision, but this may be an option. They will also look at underperforming grants to cancel them or cut back in other areas

Prudent and necessary topic, this should be a routine part of the ZCG meetings. 1 ZEC spent today is not necessarily the same as 1 ZEC spent in six months from now. The ZCG owes it to all Zcashers of today and of the future to be responsibly spending the treasury ZEC of now.

[dismad]

@decentralistdan

If the price continues to deteriorate they are also considering suspending specific programs until the price improves. This is not an immediate or concrete decision, but this may be an option. They will also look at underperforming grants to cancel them or cut back in other areas.

I think it would be helpful for some kind of public metric that ZCG is using as the basis for these decisions. This way if/when specific grants are selected as under performing the reasons why are clear and consistent.

[kworks]

I agree with Dismad, " some kind of public metric that ZCG is using as the basis for these decisions. "
Will ZCG publish a list of underperforming grants which the community can also debate the value before any actions are taken?

I think canceling one large grant is much easier than a lot of mid size grants!

[aquietinvestor]

@dismad

I think it would be helpful for some kind of public metric that ZCG is using as the basis for these decisions.

Hi @dismad and @kworks. Thank you for the feedback. We have a meeting scheduled for Monday, September 4th, and I will raise your concerns for discussion with the committee and follow up with you by late next week. In the meantime, I wanted to emphasize the part of the meeting minutes that states, “This is not an immediate or concrete decision, but may be an option” as it relates both to suspending specific programs and cancelling under-performing grants.

[noamchom]

Zcash Media can serve as a case study

They’ve been involved in three grants, all of which delivered much later than their proposal timelines for delivery, and one of which required significant additional funding for completion.

The Tm3k parachute grant would also be a good example of breaking a proposal’s timeline, and impact being subpar (the content no longer exists)

Timelines should only be one among at least a few other measures.

Others that come to mind would be

• Communication
• Quality
• Cost (adherence to original amounts)
• Impact

An example of good delivery of a proposal can be Hanu Dixit’s Zcash Anthem - timeliness, budget, communication, cost, and impact were all satisfactory!

Hanu Dixit - Zcash Anthem

[aquietinvestor]

@dismad and @kworks. The committee has discussed your requests and appreciates your suggestions regarding the cancellation of underperforming grants. However, we have decided not to implement the specific requests to publish a list of underperforming grants for community debate before taking any actions or to publish metrics on how we make decisions regarding grant cancellations. Instead, going forward, if ZCG decides to cancel a grant, we will publicly provide a detailed explanation of our decision in the relevant grant’s thread on the forum. Our decision and rationale will also be memorialized in our biweekly meeting minutes. This approach is consistent with what we’ve done in the past. I have provided an example below.

@decentralistdan

@cakewallet, the @ZcashGrants has voted to terminate the Cake Wallet grant due to inactivity and a lack of responsiveness. If the requestor would like to be considered for a new grant they must submit their request through the grant platform for ZCG’s consideration.

@decentralistdan

Cake Wallet

• Jason stated that in Danika’s milestone update they noticed that it said that Dan has reached out and the grantees are still MIA and have not been KYCed; do we want to close it and hedge back Zec? Aditya said he is in support of doing that; the last committee approved it and the applicants have been MIA for more than 6 months; he doesn’t think ZCG should keep grants hanging around; we should close it and ask them to apply again. Michael and Brian agreed. Brian added that they recently funded Hanh’s retroactive grant and wants funding to go to something that is working for Zcash. Dan stated that there has been no contact after reaching out to them multiple times. Jason said that it makes sense to relay that ZCG wants to cancel the grant on the forum saying after reaching out multiple times and after x amount of months of no response they are canceling the grant and they can resubmit on the new platform. Burns asked if this is possible legally. Alex replied, yes, as per the grant terms and conditions it is in our discretion to cancel for any reason including non action.