Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 9/15/25

Community Grants Community Grants Updates
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Grant Dashboard

Zcash Community Grants Committee Google Meet Meeting: September 15, 2025

[Minutes taken by FPF]

Attendance:

  • Artkor

  • GGuy

  • Jason

  • Zerodartz

  • Decentralistdan

  • Alex (FPF resource, notetaker)

Key Takeaways:

Open Grant Proposals

  • Zcash East Africa Meetup

    • Zcash East Africa seeks to promote financial freedom by educating communities about the importance of financial privacy and the role of Zcash ($ZEC) in enabling it. The project addresses the risks of surveillance and censorship inherent in public blockchains by teaching participants about zero-knowledge proofs and uncensorable payments. Through a series of events, workshops, and meetups, the initiative will empower individuals to understand and adopt privacy-preserving digital cash, building grassroots awareness and fostering local adoption of ZEC. Requestor is asking for $1,000. ZCG are asked for their feedback and vote.

      • Artkor: We reject this grant as proposed. However, we would support funding if a meet up demonstrably attracts a broad audience and provides high quality feedback including a post event report with metrics photos and testimonials.

      • Rejected. Recommend connecting with ZecHub.

  • ShapeShift Integration

    • ShapeShift DAO is advancing a decentralized, self-sovereign financial system by integrating Zcash into its suite of open, non-custodial tools. Building on its flagship multichain trading app, wallet, and privacy-focused products, ShapeShift aims to solve ZEC’s fragmented liquidity and limited mobile-first access. The proposal brings best-in-class ZEC wallet support across desktop, web, iOS, and Android, while unifying crosschain ZEC trading through Maya Protocol within ShapeShift’s swapper. By expanding access to ZEC alongside major assets like BTC and ETH, and amplifying its role as a leading privacy asset through global outreach, ShapeShift will increase adoption and usability of ZEC within a broader DeFi ecosystem. Requestor is asking for $50,000. ZCG are asked for their feedback.

      • Jason: Of the requested amount, $36,000 goes to subsidize one year of Zcash infrastructure costs and $14,000 to marketing efforts. We are going to hold off on voting on this grant because we have some questions for the team. I asked the ShapeShift team on Discord: Why does it cost $5,000 to run the node infrastructure? Is it possible to structure the grant without the marketing costs? Do you have any support / metrics that show the benefits of marketing? Wouldn’t ShapeShift, say, Tweet about integrating Zcash even if we didn’t provide grant funding for marketing?

      • Remains open.

  • Web3 Outreach Initiative

    • This four-month initiative led by Dapp Mentors combines innovation, education, and outreach to grow the Zcash ecosystem. The project will deliver a proof-of-concept AI agent marketplace that demonstrates Zcash’s privacy features in decentralized Web3 economies, produce comprehensive tutorial courses to onboard global developers, and host a high-impact community event in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, engaging 150–200 participants. By showcasing practical applications of Zcash in AI-driven DeFi, filling critical educational content gaps, and expanding developer awareness in Africa and beyond, this initiative directly addresses barriers to adoption and positions Zcash as a leader in privacy-preserving Web3 innovation. Requestor is asking for $20,000. ZCG are asked for their feedback and vote.

      • Jason: This is out of scope for what we want to currently fund.

      • Artkor: This is not the applicant’s first proposal. We generally value this team’s education work where videos reach a broad audience and show real demand. However, Zcash differs materially from EVM chains and other networks with their own smart contract languages. In Zcash, practical content either lives deep in the protocol or resolves to simple user interfaces that don’t warrant three to four deep dive videos. Therefore there isn’t yet enough practical broad broadly demanded material to justify a full course of this kind. We’d be glad to see the applicant join ZecHub and take part in targeted bounty programs.

      • Gguy: We’re just not in a place to fund these types of unproven projects.

      • Rejected.

  • ZecSplit

    • ZecSplit is an open-source, privacy-first bill-splitting app designed to meet a recurring need in the Zcash community: seamless expense sharing at events, summits, and social gatherings. Built for iOS and Android with direct Zashi wallet integration, the app enables shielded-by-default group expense tracking, flexible splits, and one-click settlement of balances in ZEC. By eliminating the hassle of manual calculations and transaction coordination, ZecSplit not only solves a top community-identified pain point but also demonstrates Zcash’s real-world utility for everyday financial interactions. Fully open-source under Apache 2.0, it ensures long-term community ownership while showcasing ZEC’s advantages in privacy-preserving digital payments. Requestor is asking for $47,500. ZCG are asked for their feedback and vote.

      • Decentralistdan: The cost is too high. I do appreciate the initiative of a community member seeing the wish list and putting their foot forward but at the moment it’s out of scope for funding.

      • Artkor: I’m likewise inclined to believe that this feature built into a popular wallet will be more in demand than a standalone app. Currently, global trends show clear fatigue, people are tired of installing yet another app. Accordingly, we see more value in a software development kit providing this functionality rather than a separate application. It would be great if the applicant considered participating in the ZecHub hackathon.

      • Gguy: I agree, this as a separate app limits its usage. I reject.

      • Zerodartz: This idea or feature would be nice to have, but mostly when built into wallets. Maybe they could provide a library so wallets could implement this feature easily?

      • Jason: Ideally they’d reach out to the Zashi team or another wallet team, see if they’re open to integration, align on design, and then build it. Another standalone app will result in something built that doesn’t get used.

      • Rejected.

  • Zaino, the Zallet Release

    • The Requestor proposes upgrading Zaino, a pure Rust indexer, to a production-ready state so it can serve as a resilient backbone for consumers such as Zallet, ZecRocks, and Zingolib in accessing Zcash Blockchain Indices. Having proven itself as a flexible proof-of-concept, Zaino is now ready for integration into the broader Z3 system. This grant would enable the Requestor to address key integration issues, refactor internal patterns to eliminate bug classes at compile time, and dynamically triage new issues—ensuring stability, efficiency, and long-term maintainability. By refining Zaino’s type system and core abstractions based on real-world testing, the Requestor aims to deliver a mature, reliable indexer that strengthens the usability and accessibility of Zcash. Requestor is asking for $69,811.20. It’s too early to vote so ZCG members are asked to provide their initial feedback.

      • Gguy: I think this is one of those situations where more work is being required to get this out the door and I’m happy for that to continue.

      • ZeroDartz: It would be great if this work wouldn’t be needed, but it is needed, and we have to do as much as we can to make Zcashd deprecation happen in the near future.

      • Artkor: Given the urgency of this task I want to approve this proposal.

      • Remains open.

Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups

  • Ledger

    • Ledger legal team is checking the grant application content so we can officially submit it, and mention the appropriate person who will pass the KYC on Ledger side

    • On product side, Ledger is working on the specifications particularly for adding accounts and retrieving shielded balances

    • The engineering team is currently focusing on evaluating how can we use native SDKs for Ledger Live Mobile as we can only rely on WebZ.js (ts + web assembly) for Ledger Live Desktop

  • Dark Prague

    • Zcash Community Grants is sponsoring the event. Frank Braun will be presenting on Zcash and also be on a panel about L1 privacy. Members from the Zashi team, ZCG, ZecHub, and the Zcash Foundation will be in attendance. ZCG got a booth as part of the sponsorship, and the Zashi team will be handing out swag and helping people onboard.

  • Multifactor change request

    • The team has requested that they need to make adjustments to move some things from milestone 1 to milestone 2, keeping in mind that there are six deliverables in milestone 1. The ask is to move milestone one, the MFCHF and the MFDPG, which are modes which do not prevent Zcash teams from experimenting on the MFKDF side of things. So if those two things were moved into milestone two, which makes more sense as they’ve requested, that means they can focus their efforts on the priorities of MFKDF more readily and make sure all those implementations are covered. They can then request payout for the revised milestone 1. ZCG approved this change.
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