Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) Meeting Minutes 1/20/25

Community Grants Community Grants Updates
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Zcash Community Grant Dashboard

Zcash Community Grants Committee Google Meet Meeting: January 20, 2025

[Minutes taken by Alex]

Attendance:

  • Artkor
  • Brian
  • GGuy
  • Jason
  • Zerodartz
  • Alex (FPF resource, notetaker)

Key Takeaways:

Open Grant Proposals

  • Zcash Global Turkish 2025
    • First up Zcash Global Turkish 2025. They’re requesting $5,700 to support the growth of Zcash’s presence in Turkey through educational campaigns. They aim to increase Zcash adoption by creating Turkish language content including YouTube videos, social media posts, translations of key documentation, hosting podcast events, organized competitions and providing continuous support via Telegram and Discord. The grant of $5,700 covers compensation for three community managers and the startup costs for domain registration, hosting, and the tools needed for content creation. They are requesting $1,900 upfront, $1,900 after completion of the first month, $1,900 upon completion of month two, no additional payment for month three. ZCG members are asked to provide feedback and their vote.
    • Brian: Approved.
    • Gguy: I see value in what they’ve delivered to date. Approved.
    • Artkor: I believe this is a well balanced and timely proposal. Turkey has been facing high inflation for several years which has made cryptocurrencies highly popular, especially among young people, but Zcash isn’t a popular coin yet. I hope with this grant, the Turkish community will help us gain more supporters in this region. I fully support this grant.
    • ZeroDartz: I would like to see them grow the community, grow education and gain more popularity for Zcash in Turkey. I approve this grant.
    • Jason: I approve this grant. As I’ve previously said, I think Turkey is an incredibly important place to focus on for cryptocurrency adoption for the reasons Artkor pointed out and Zcash has a strong use case there.I’ve been really impressed with how diligent this team has been so far both in terms of resilience and persistence when they get rejected from ZCG and then applied for funding through ZecHub and also in terms of creating content. I’m happy to see that this grant will get them through the next few months and look forward to seeing what else they have planned for 2025.
    • Unanimous approval for this grant.
  • ZSAs in NU7
    • This proposal outlines Qedit’s efforts to integrate Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs) into the NU7 upgrade with a focus on coordination across teams and repositories. Qedit plans to allocate a team of seven engineers to implement the requirements, review components, and maintain tools. The monthly budget is up to $105,000 per month. The integration will involve close collaboration with ECC and ZF to ensure smooth development and to address technical challenges. The goal was to have ZSAs included in NU7 by the summer of 2025. But, in his forum update yesterday, Josh mentioned NU7 getting pushed back to October; it sounds like there’s more information forthcoming on that. Qedit was asked how this would affect the grant proposal and more conversation is required. ZCG decided to move forward with discussing and voting on this grant as-is with consideration given to any changes that arise due to NU7 timing. Gguy was first asked to summarize feedback from ZF and ECC engineers and then the committee will go around and provide feedback and vote.
    • Gguy: ZCG received feedback from ZF and ECC. While we all pondered if 7 engineers are necessary, which contributes to the maximum monthly cost feeling high, the overall feedback was positive. Personally speaking, 7 engineers isn’t beyond reasonable for this work and I believe merging this work into Zebra is a high priority to minimise the overheads of maintaining a fork. I think having a larger team to pull from will be beneficial and hopefully speed up this work. I approve the current grant in its current form with possible expectations that they may need to provide ongoing support post July.
    • Brian: I approve. I want to see ZSAs deployed and delivered, and we’ve spent a lot of money on this functionality so far. I think it’s important for the community to stay aware that any delays essentially causes the community to spend more on continuing to try to maintain and support this feature before it actually gets deployed. So I hope that NU7 comes quickly and that ZSAs are deployed and ready for Zcash users.
    • Jason: ZSAs was the first grant I voted on when Brian and I joined the committee in January 2022. It’s probably the grant that I’ve been most excited about because I think the additional added functionality in the Zcash protocol will be something that expands Zcash’s use case and increases user adoption as well. In terms of this specific grant, I think it’s necessary. We need ZSAs to be integrated into the protocol and the other grants didn’t cover that work. The one thing that I’m curious about is whether or not this should be ongoing work or if there’s just a fixed amount of things that they have to do in order to integrate it into the protocol. We’ll have that conversation with Qedit on a future Arborist call. I approve this grant.
    • Zerodartz: I mostly agree with everyone, but my personal opinion is it seems a bit expensive, and all the ZSA stuff has been really expensive. But we can’t let this huge amount of work stop before the finish line. We should get it all shipped and launched. I approve this grant.
    • Artkor: Yes, this grant has been a priority for years and I approve.
    • Gguy: Additional comment; I’d like to add the record that this type of work is really important to the decentralization of the Zcash protocol and engineering teams. Qedit is probably one of the most qualified teams outside of the core teams that work on Zcash… So I think that in itself is a huge benefit.
    • Unanimous approval for this grant.
  • Proposal for Zcash AI Assistant
    • This proposal outlines the development of an AI assistant which is a Telegram bot aimed at improving community engagement with the Zcash ecosystem. The bot will enhance accessibility, provide seamless interaction with Zcash’s tools, and improve community engagement through education, privacy insights, and utility features.They’re asking for $25,000 and they say that the project will be developed in three phases with a demo available within three to four weeks. ZCG members are asked to provide feedback and their vote.
    • Gguy: I haven’t seen any potential user engagement on this grant. So it’s hard to know if there will be any users. I reject this grant.
    • Brian: Agreed, rejected.
    • Artkor: I can’t support this grant because even though Telegram is a popular app, I don’t think it’s the best platform for finishing information. It’s not widely used for that purpose. People are more likely to use ChatGPT or similar tools to get answers. Also, the funding amount requested is quite large, which makes it less appealing. I reject this grant.
    • Zerodartz: I agree. The budget is a bit too high and it doesn’t seem that useful. And we already have a Discord bot that could be implemented into Telegram in the future if needed. I reject it.
    • Jason: I reject it as well. Too high of a cost and like Zerodartz said, James Katz has done work on the Telegram bot in Discord. I think they’ve already started to look at adding it to Telegram. I think we can use already deployed resources to make this happen if the community wants to see it.
    • Unanimous rejection for this grant.
  • Zcash Nigeria 2025
    • This proposal outlines a project to expand Zcash’s presence in Nigeria by raising awareness, building a community and promoting adoption through educational content. The project aims to tackle the challenges of financial privacy awareness, merchant adoption and misconceptions about privacy coins by creating local resources, organizing meetups and engaging with businesses. Chidi is the lead. He’s a former ambassador and he’s put together a team of four members and they’re all frequent contributors to Zechub. They’re asking for $9,600 for three months to focus on content creation, community management, and hosting events.
    • Too early to vote. ZCG members provided their initial impressions of this grant.
    • Artkor: ECC posted some Zashi statistics on the forum. The fact that Nigeria is leading in the number of Zashi downloads in the Android device segment, which was very exciting to see. I also checked the inflation in the country last year, it exceeded 34%. Additionally, the number of Zcash searches, according to Google statistics, remains high. I’m usually skeptical about the effectiveness of additional funding for local community meetings, however, in the Nigeria case, I think it’s great, as life education programs can be more impactful than YouTube channels. By the way, did you know that the first thread on the Forum by a Nigerian resident was created in October 2016!
    • Jason: I didn’t know that, that’s pretty cool. So Nigeria has had a presence in the community since the beginning. I very much support this grant. I spoke to Chidi before he applied and gave him guidance on how to structure the grant and I’m happy to see the resulting proposal. I’m even happier to see the team that he put together. It includes other core contributors to Zcash and ZecHub. The amount makes sense for a team of four and I look forward to seeing what they can do over the next three months. I think Nigeria is an incredibly important place for Zcash. The areas that we’re now focused now including Nigeria, Turkey, Venezuela, Latin America, and Brazil seem like where Zcash adoption has the potential to grow and where we can continue to build vibrant communities. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in terms of community growth over the year.
    • Gguy: Nothing to add, I’m in favor of this grant.
    • Zerodartz: I agree with most of you. And yes, this group of people have been active and contributing on ZecHub. I’d like to see them contribute full-time with a team and manage some events also. I like Cjfrankien, who has already managed an event at Nigerian Polytechnic school. I’m in favor of this grant.
    • Brian: I’m optimistic about the grant and their established community members and it’s an important region. I’m in favor of this grant.
    • Jason: Great. Let’s wait and see community feedback and then we can officially vote at the next meeting.
    • Too early to vote, will vote at the next meeting.

Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups

  • Ledger Update
    • Meeting to be set up with ZCG/Pacu/Zondax/ZF to discuss next steps.
  • Pacu Z|ECC Summit Expenses
    • ZCG approved Pacu’s request for funding for travel to the ZF Dev Summit/Real World Crypto/ZKProof. Value approved is up to $3,570 USD (actual TBD).
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