Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 9/16/2024

Community Grants Community Grants Updates
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Please find the latest ZCG meeting minutes and Public Dashboard link below.

Attendance:

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

Key Takeaways:

  • Open Grant Proposals
  • Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups
    • FPF Transition - GGuy is continuing his work to have GitHub replace Submittable for ZCG grants, and FPF is on track with back-office preparations.

Open Grant Proposals

  • Zingo Labs Accelerates zcashd Depreciation- Jason gave background for this grant. This grant’s focus is to accelerate the deprecation of Zcashd by creating a new piece of software called Zaino, which will act as an interface between Zebra and both a new CLI Wallet and light wallets (providing an alternative to the existing lightwalletd implementation). The funding will cover hardware, software, and compensation costs, with the project expected to deliver a documented and tested implementation. The goal is to facilitate the deprecation of Zcashd and enhance protocol development by October 2024. Originally, Za Wilcox was requesting $76,000 for this grant but has since grown to $259,800 to support a larger team, new milestones, and develop an indexer.
    • The committee met with Zancas last Friday, which resulted in ZCG expressing a desire to meet with core engineers from both ZF and ECC to gather more input before moving forward.
    • This grant will be on the agenda for the next Arborist Call (on Thursday, 19th Sept). The call will be used to discuss a plan forward, seek clarity, and receive feedback on the best architecture for a new CLI wallet from both teams. The aim is to provide feedback to Zingo, and guidance to ZCG on this grant proposal.
    • Although ZCG agreed to wait until Thursday’s Arborist Call, GGuy emphasized the need for clarity on at least one milestone to have a more concrete understanding to approve Zingo’s proposal sooner rather than later.
    • Jonathan from QEDIT has contacted Jason to express his interest in being involved with Zcashd Deprecation. Jack will invite Jon and Vivek to the weekly Zcashd Deprecation calls.
    • This grant will remain open.
      • NB: This grant application was revised the day after this meeting took place.
  • Zcash Global En Espanol - Jason gave background on this grant. The proposal seeks $9,000 to enhance Zcash’s outreach in Spanish-speaking Latin America from October to December 2024. The project will focus on increasing Zcash’s visibility through educational content, digital presence, and community engagement via social media, YouTube, newsletters, and online events. The team, including members from the Zcash Español community, aim to address financial privacy issues and promote Zcash as a solution across the region. This effort includes producing content on social media, managing a podcast, and launching an online radio station.
    • The committee went around to cast their votes.
    • The grant was rejected with a 4-to-1 vote. While ZCG acknowledged that this team does good work, the committee felt they were not in a position to solely manage community-based grants and initiatives at this time. However, they remain hopeful for a potential ZecHub collaboration on similar grants in the future.
    • Jason voted to approve the grant for the following reasons:
      • The Espanol team has a solid track record and has received little to no historical funding to support their initiatives.
      • The grant request was small. A total of $9,000 covers a team of 5 people for three months.
      • It would be great to see what this community could achieve with structured funding, similar to Zcash Brazil.
      • Jason supports ZecHub managing community-focused grants; however, establishing a funding pool for community initiatives through ZecHub would take time to set up, and since it does not yet exist, he would vote for approving the grant now to get the Espanol team funding for the rest of 2024 to allow for a smooth transition.

Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups

  • FPF Transition
    • Submittable Replacement - GGuy is working on using GitHub as the new ZCG grants platform to replace Submittable. Work is ongoing.
    • Other - FPF continues to take various back-office actions to prepare for the ZCG transition. All actions are progressing as planned.
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This post provides no explanation for why the Zcash Global En Espanol grant was rejected. If this reflects some new ZCG plan/funding “strategy,” it needs to be made public.

Why was this tiny grant of $9K from some of the most positive, engaged, and productive members of the community rejected? Reasons to fund it are abundant, and some of them are outlined in this post. Reasons for rejecting this grant are a unclear. Given that this decision is rumored to represent the start of a dangerous trend that will affect every project and every developer in the ecosystem, we need to know how the four ZCG members came to their decision on this.

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But we’ll spend over a half million on a media company to generate interest and adoption that was continually delayed… makes total sense.

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@cryptomuncher More like $1M - that’s the total amount ZM walked away with. The first couple of videos, which were of much higher quality, were covered outside of the last grant.

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That “media company” does not do what a community does: it approaches users, clarifies doubts, teaches, shares knowledge and use cases.

The proven results of the Zcash Brazil and Zcash en Español communities are unquestionable and incomparable from every point of view.

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That was my point, the $9k ask was peanuts and would like generate more grassroots support than the long-form videos that sucked up $1mil.

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