Zcash Community Grants Committee Google Meet Meeting: March 17, 2025
[Minutes taken by FPF]
Attendance:
- Artkor
- Brian
- GGuy
- Jason
- Zerodartz
- Alex (FPF resource, notetaker)
Key Takeaways:
- Open Grants
- Zcash Arabia
- Unanimous rejection.
- Zcash Governance Model Design
- Unanimous rejection.
- Zenith Full Node Wallet 2025
- Vote pending additional information.
- Eliza OS Zcash Plugin
- Too early to vote.
- Zcash Arabia
Open Grant Proposals
- Zcash Arabia
- This is an initiative aimed at expanding Zcash adoption and education in the Middle Eastern and North African regions by providing localized resources, tools, and developer support in Arabic. The project will create an Arabic Zcash academy with educational games, articles and videos, while also engaging the community through events, AMAs and other competitions. They also plan to support developer growth by offering workshops, guides and incentives to encourage Arabic speaking developers to build on the Zcash network. They’re asking for $11,500 for a three month period. ZCG has discussed in brainstorm sessions how these guys, similar to other community groups, should start out in ZecHub to “prove their value” prior to submitting a grant request to ZCG. So maybe starting off with something smaller, demonstrating their commitment to the community, the value that they add, and then possibly applying for a grant. ZCG members were asked to provide their input and vote.
- ZCG members were asked if anyone is directly familiar with the contributors on this grant. No members indicated that they knew any of the contributors.
- Brian: I agree, I’d like to see a consistent track record of contributions to the community outside of ZCG before I can vote yes on a grant like this. I vote to reject.
- Artkor: I thank the Zcash Arabia team for their interest in the Zcash community and I agree with the previous statements. Get more involved with ZecHub is the correct first stage. I vote to reject.
- Gguy, ZeroDartz and Jason all indicated “reject” votes.
- This grant has been unanimously rejected.
- Zcash Governance Model Design
- Next one is Zcash Governance Model Design. This is Areta and they are proposing a structured process to select Zcash’s next governance model. They’re focused on stakeholder input, community feedback and a comprehensive analysis of governance options. They divided the project into three phases starting with designing a decision making mechanism and then mapping out governance models and facilitating workshops with the community to refine the options. They’re asking for a grant of $190,000 with the milestones spread across three phases concluding in a successful governance model selection. With this one there are a couple of things at hand. One, it’s cool that they are coming in as an independent outside actor to help Zcash independently decide on a governance model rather than it coming from a specific org or possibly being tied to someone’s agenda or interest. The downside is that this would be a much slower moving process than if we all just discussed the current proposed options and made a decision on those. This past Friday, Josh posted on the Forum calling for zips for extending the Dev Fund also possibly creating a new governance model. So the question is, do we want to sort of compete with those efforts? The process would move much slower and it’s unclear what the delivery would be. ZCG members were asked for their input and vote.
- Artkor: I think it’s a very interesting proposal and I’m very interested in doing research on all governance options for our community. I like that this team is not affiliated with existing organizations. But I think everyone realizes the proposed 12 months is a long time frame. Pushing back implementation timeframes is an unacceptable luxury and I think the community agrees with that thought. I vote to reject.
- Brian: I also think this proposal is very interesting. Had it been brought up sooner, we likely would have entertained this proposal. I do think that the state of leadership within the existing organizations, as well as increases in community activity leave me optimistic about the community being able to come up with a proposal on its own rather than needing this one. I vote to decline.
- ZeroDartz: I really like this proposal overall, but the timeline is a bit too long now and if they could somehow make a shorter proposal with a few month duration somehow, that might be interesting. I would really support some sort of outside party to participate in this governance development, but right now, I have to decline.
- Gguy: I think the issue I have with funding this is just it would require a lot of cross-team collaboration and buy-in and there just doesn’t seem to be much excitement around it at the moment. So if we did wish to explore this further, it would probably require a lot of collaboration with all the parties. But at the moment as it stands, that doesn’t seem to be the direction the community wants to go. So unless something changes or somebody wants to explore this further I’m happy to reject this.
- Jason: For context, Robert, who is doing part-time work at Shielded Labs, found Areta, and we thought it could help address the challenge of encouraging collaboration between organizations on a new governance model. At the beginning, I fully supported this proposal, but I agree with many of the points you all have raised. There are a couple of issues at play here. First, with Jack’s departure from ZF, it feels like the situation has shifted and now collaboration between the orgs is possible. The community doesn’t have a lot of time if we want to extend the dev fund and introduce a new funding model before ZIP 1015 ends in November. Areta will require a lot of time to assess stakeholder interests and propose a new funding and governance model. It feels like they’re joining the conversation too late. There’s also a chance that, in the end, we end up choosing an existing proposal, which would be a waste of time, resources, and money. There’s also a concern around funding. We have limited funds and might need to step in to ensure that ECC and ZF have sufficient funding. Due to the current price of ZEC, we have limited funding to allocate to a project like this. Given these issues, I think it makes sense for the community to go forward without Areta and work toward extending the dev fund and introducing a new funding model before the current dev fund expires in November. Once the ecosystem’s financial situation improves, we can consider bringing in Areta to help refine the governance process over the long term.
- This grant has been unanimously rejected.
- Zenith Full Node Wallet 2025
- So Vergara Technologies, run by Pitmutt is proposing to enhance the Zenith Full Node Wallet by adding support for Frost Multi-sig wallets and integrating the Keystone hardware wallet for private storage. The Grant is going to fund the development of functionality to create Multi-sig wallets using distributed key generation and enable the signing of and initiation of multi-sig transactions. Total request is $91,700 covering development costs, hardware purchases and a donation to the Open Privacy Research Society. As we previously discussed, before we vote on this, we want to get a sense of how many users the wallet has. This will be brought up on this week’s Arborist Call. This info will help the committee determine if there is demand and if this proposal is worth the cost in a resource constrained environment. ZCG members were asked to provide their input and vote.
- Artkor: I realize that right now there aren’t a large number of fans of desktop wallets. But the people who use them are usually very technically advanced. They are system administrators and developers. I believe that this is a very important part of Zcash users and adherents and I don’t want to measure everything in quantitative terms only. I deeply respect this category of people, the pioneers of Zcash, and I want them to have a full arsenal of tools to work with, including hardware signatures and multi-signatures. We’ve been waiting for these two technologies with anticipation and I’m really interested in giving them priority and distribution as much as possible. So, I see this as a useful investigation for expanding the capabilities of our ecosystem.
- Jason: I agree with what Artkor said, and I also appreciate Pitmutt’s efforts. I find him to be a high-quality contributor. He’s super easy to work with and he delivers on time and does great work. The issue for me isn’t about the wallet. I agree that we need to give developers and community members all the tools and resources they need, and I think that the integrations he wants to complete with FROST and Keystone are useful. My issue is that we have very limited funding and we have orgs that may need to tap ZCG funding in the future. My personal view is that we should be super conservative and how we allocate funding until we figure out what’s going on with extending the Dev fund, org finances, and the price of ZEC. Before voting, I’d like to get a sense from Pitmut how many users Zenith has and from the core devs on the Arborist call, how many are using or intend to use it.
- Brian: I pretty much echo everything that Artkor and Jason said and I’m curious to hear the outcomes from the Arborist Call.
- ZeroDartz: Yeah I would also like to wait a bit and hear more opinions and views or the amount of possible users and then decide.
- Gguy: I definitely encourage or would like to continue encouraging grants of this nature, but I think as Jason was alluding to this just isn’t a priority issue right now. We need to plan appropriately for the future.
- Jason: Okay, so we’ll hold off voting till the next meeting. In the meantime I’ll solicit feedback at the next Arborist Call and then we’ll go from there.
- Vote will occur next meeting.
- Eliza OS Zcash Plugin
- ElizaOS is an open-source operating system designed for AI agents that facilitates the development and deployment of autonomous agents. We aim to integrate Zcash’s privacy-preserving technology into this ecosystem through a plugin with three primary components: Wallet Management, Transaction Capabilities, and Real-time Blockchain Data. The plugin will adhere to ElizaOS’s modular architecture, where Actions function as commands available to agents and Providers serve as data feeds to the agent’s operational context. All components will be released as open-source software to encourage community contribution and educational engagement. $20,000 is being requested. It’s too early to vote on this proposal so ZCG members are asked to provide their initial feedback.
- Jason: AI Agents are very new. A lot of people integrate them with NEAR Intents. I don’t think right now is the right time to fund this. We should wait for AI Agent technology to mature and see what its applications and use cases are to see if it’s something that the community desires. Does anybody currently support this grant?
- Artkor: They already have a huge audience of enthusiasts similar to our community, many of whom have advanced programming skills. Personally, I’m interested in this proposal.
- ZeroDartz: I would really like to see what happens with the Near hackathon and then decide afterwards. More community feedback and opinions on these AI agents sort of things from Zcashers would be great as well.
- Too early to vote.
Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups
- Maya Protocol
- ZCG is aware of the timing and importance of this project and the committee wants this shipped as soon as possible. ZCG will be meeting with Maya Protocol and Hanh shortly to discuss how to move this project forward. An update will be shared with the community shortly.
- Tor
- ZCG had a productive call with TOR to brainstorm ideas on how to leverage the TOR community to drive Zcash adoption. TOR and ZCG discussed sharing stories that are relevant to both communities and TOR exploring implementing a shielded ZEC donation solution. BTCPayServer came up as well which leads to an update below.
- BTCPayServer update: Brian to reach out to 1337bytes to follow-up on their potential interest in adding the required functionality.
- Community Noteaker
- The submission deadline has passed and four proposals have been received. ZCG will make a decision by March 31.