Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 9/14/2026

Community Grants Community Grants Updates
2

  • zcashlib: A Pure-JavaScript Zcash Library

    • Applicant requests a forward grant to build the first pure-JavaScript implementation of Zcash’s shielded protocol — transparent transactions, shielded key hierarchy/viewing keys/Unified Addresses, trial decryption/commitment tree/background scanning, and a JavaScript Groth16 prover for Sapling circuits — validated against official test vectors and librustzcash, with no WASM or native bindings. Requesting $150,000.

      • Artkor: In addition to the concerns already mentioned, everyone who has ever served on ZCG knows how expensive it is for the community to maintain libraries over time. In this case I don’t think it makes much sense to support two similar ones in parallel. The library we already have, and that is already being used, is enough. So I reject the second proposal too.

      • Gguy: As stated for the previous grant, we’re rejecting this one as well today.

      • Declined

  • Zcash Awareness, Education & Community Growth Campaign

    • Applicant requests a grant for a social media marketing campaign on X and Binance Square — educational threads, posts, and articles about Zcash’s privacy features and technical updates, with community engagement and query responses. Requesting $5,000.

      • Artkor: I didn’t find anything in the accounts that were provided that gave me confidence this project makes sense, so I decline this.

      • Gguy: I also struggled to see the value in this project.

      • Paul: I would reject. I can’t imagine that we need a growth campaign on X at this point. If everyone else’s feed is like mine, it’s dominated by Zcash. I just can’t imagine there’s value in funding more education on X.

      • Zerodartz: Agreed. Decline.

      • Declined

  • Zcash Flutter Wallet SDK

    • Applicant requests a grant to build a production Flutter plugin for the Zcash Android and Swift Wallet SDKs — a stable Dart API with typed platform bridge (Pigeon), Swift/Kotlin adapters to official SDK public APIs, lifecycle management, capability matrix, automated CI, and 6 months of post-release maintenance — explicitly not a wallet UI, not a new wallet engine, and not direct Rust FFI. Requesting $10,000.

      • Gguy: A year or two ago this might have been something I would have looked at more closely, but as it exists today, and given the changes in AI and software development, I don’t think this is something I’m willing to fund at this amount.

      • Hanh: There actually are a few wallets out there that already use this technology. YWallet uses Flutter for the UI with librustzcash and some private Rust code for the back end, so this is not new. Lately we have a couple of other wallets doing the same thing — Vizor is also on Flutter and Zkool is also on Flutter. The approach we have all taken differs from this one, because we have the back end and business logic in Rust and use code generation to bind between Flutter and Rust. What they propose to do here is fairly manual binding. If they do manual binding, the price they quote is too low; if they do automatic binding, it is too high, because obviously you can do it automatically. And if they do automatic binding it would actually be not that useful, because librustzcash does not have the abstractions that are needed to call it natively from Flutter. Long story short, this doesn’t really fit anywhere, so I reject.

      • Declined

  • 24 Videos @zkMarketer

    • Applicant requests a grant to fund 12 weeks of 2-per-week short documentary-style films (24 total) assembled from existing ecosystem footage — clips from protocol engineers, co-founders, outside commentators, and institutional voices threaded into single-argument 2-minute films, with everything downloadable at full quality, no credit required. Requesting $60,000.

      • Gguy: I think we were impressed with some of the content we’ve already seen, and we’re looking to approve this one today.

      • Artkor: He has already shown that he can make good Zcash content, and I’ve seen in practice that this is exactly the kind of content that tends to spread organically and reach a wider audience. I approve.

      • Paul: I approve. I really appreciate the approach taken here to demonstrate the kind of product that can be created and give us something concrete to evaluate before asking for ZCG funding. That is super helpful in this case. I think the content is great, the price is reasonable, and it’s generating a lot of content in a short amount of time with milestones. I think it’s a really good project. Happy to approve.

      • Zerodartz: The strength is that a lot of Zcashers have already supported these videos by sharing them on Twitter, and they have done quite well also numbers wise — they’re very well edited and put together. So even though the budget is a bit on the higher side compared with the industry average for short-form videos, it makes sense, since the quality and research of the topics is there. It’s $2,500 per video. I approve.

      • Approved

  • ZecScope (Zcash network upgrade / ZIP tracker)

    • Applicant proposes a public open-source website tracking Zcash ZIPs, network upgrade roadmap, wallet readiness matrix, and ZCG funding/resourcing view — modeled on Ethereum’s Forkcast, with automated sync from the zips repo and PR-based wallet team submissions, plus an 8-week post-launch stabilization window. Requesting $36,300.

      • Hanh: I’m not clear what it’s going to do. I like the idea, but I don’t know if it’s going to work out, because a lot of the data is not easy to collect.

      • Gguy: I also had concerns that a lot of this information might require manual input and can’t be automated or sourced from GitHub or a document that already exists. I may reach out to the applicant to make them aware that this might not be possible, even though I like the idea.

      • Hanh: When they say network upgrade roadmap, we were concerned that we don’t have a roadmap for network upgrades as far as I know. The ZIP tracker is also very challenging, because there are tons of ZIPs in different states — some abandoned, some in progress — and you can’t really tell from GitHub. The wallet readiness matrix is also challenging, because some wallets report things that are not exactly correct and some don’t report anything; I’m one of the ones who doesn’t report much. It would be good to have, it’s just very challenging.

      • Zerodartz: That’s good feedback for developers and the community — we should have a clearer roadmap for the network upgrades.

      • Remains open (data availability concerns; Gguy to contact the applicant)

  • Kestrel + ZecAuth: Open Zcash Wallet Connectivity with African Fiat On/Off-Ramps

    • Applicant requests a grant to productionize three integrated components: ZecAuth (scoped wallet-to-application authorization protocol), Kestrel (production self-custodial Zcash wallet derived from their ZecWallet prototype), and KuvarSend’s ZecAuth integration (first production fiat↔ZEC on/off-ramp using ZecAuth, targeting African local currencies) — with 1,200+ registered users, 600+ transactions, and $30,000+ volume already on KuvarSend. Requesting $12,000.

      • Artkor: I don’t have a clear decision on this one yet, but I’m inclined to decline it, because a big part of the project seems to depend on KuvarSend’s existing payment infrastructure, and from what I understand that infrastructure already exists and is already being used — at least based on the East Africa proposal we discussed today. So I’m not sure what exactly ZCG would be funded here.

      • Too early to vote

  • Zcash Wallet State Integrity: Self-Healing Transaction History

    • Applicant requests a grant to fix three specific transaction-history integrity defects in zcash_client_sqlite — nullable trust_status in v_transactions (causing complete history query failure in mobile SDKs), unusable stored transaction bytes blocking re-retrieval, and missing shielded output attribution when funding account is discovered after storage — with regression tests and mobile SDK validation for each. Requesting $8,500.

      • Hanh: He’s offering to fix a couple of bugs. In cases like this it’s a matter of knowing whether these bugs are worth fixing. There are a bunch of things in the GitHub issue database which are old issues that nobody really cares about anymore. It’s not worth just picking a bug, and the price is very high — several thousand for one bug.

      • Too early to vote

  • Research on a fully constant-time proving pipeline for open-source hardware wallet architectures, reusable for standard computers

    • Applicant requests a grant to research and implement architecture-specific constant-time alternatives to algorithms in the Halo2 proving pipeline — targeting STT chips/FPGAs for AST parsing and potentially full proving, with secondary x86-64 and ARM implementations for desktop/mobile, motivated by the hardware wallet context where full circuit validation is currently impractical. Requesting $96,000.

      • Too early to vote
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