Zcash Community Grants Committee Google Meet Meeting: April 28, 2025
[Minutes taken by FPF]
Attendance:
- Artkor
- Brian
- GGuy
- Jason
- Zerodartz
- Alex (FPF resource, notetaker)
Key Takeaways:
- Open Grants
- Ledger Live Integration
- Remains open.
- Zcash Lightwalletd Network Monitoring Service
- Unanimous rejection.
- Zcash Global Turkish (Q2 2025)
- Remains open.
- Ledger Live Integration
Open Grant Proposals
- Ledger Live Integration
- Zondax: This project’s main objective is to integrate the new Zcash Ledger Shielded application with Ledger Live to enable transparent transaction support. While they intend to explore shielded transaction integration in a subsequent phase, their initial focus is on delivering transparent transaction support within a reasonable timeframe to ensure a successful and timely release. The requestor is asking for $95,000.
- The committee is continuing deliberations related to this grant. An update will be provided shortly.
- Zcash Lightwalletd Network Monitoring Service
- This proposal outlines a plan to establish a reliable, automated monitoring and maintenance system for the Zcash network, with a focus on lightwalletd performance and availability. It includes deploying a geographically distributed Kubernetes (k3s) cluster across Europe, the U.S., and Asia using Hetzner Cloud, managed with Terraform and Ansible for automation and resilience. The system will leverage tools like Prometheus and Grafana for continuous monitoring, paired with an on-call support service providing approximately 1.27 hours of engineering time per day. Critical incidents will be acknowledged within 12 hours and investigated within 24 hours, with non-critical issues addressed within 1–2 business days. The total proposed budget is $75,000, covering both infrastructure and operations costs. ZCG members were asked to provide their feedback and vote.
- Jason: I believe we align on the fact that this grant is too expensive for what we want to fund. It’s less about infrastructure more about monitoring.
- Brian: Feels like a large ask that isn’t necessary at this time.
- Gguy: One of the goals of this RFP was to reduce infrastructure cost while increasing decentralization via a lower cost. At this high cost it doesn’t meet those goals.
- Artkor: Cost does not align with community capabilities. Better for the community to focus on better decentralization and related systems.
- Zerodartz: Don’t see the point of this service, we don’t have that many servers and if we needed it there are more budget friendly solutions.
- Jason: Worth noting that Hanh did it for $6,000.
- Unanimous rejection.
- Zcash Global Turkish (Q2 2025)
- This project aims to introduce Zcash to a wider audience in Turkey, raise awareness about the importance of financial privacy, and build a strong, sustainable Turkish Zcash community. By leveraging Turkey’s growing interest in cryptocurrencies and Zcash’s advanced privacy technology, the initiative will focus on education, content creation, and community building across platforms like Telegram, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. Local events will further support these efforts by providing direct education about Zcash and financial privacy, with the ultimate goal of increasing adoption and long-term community growth. Requestor is asking for $10,400 for three months of funding.
- Artkor put together a short poll for gauging Turkish community sentiment on this group’s effort so far. Waiting for results prior to the ZCG vote.
Brainstorm Session Follow-Ups
- Maya Protocol Update
- Maya is active, no end date yet, ZCG continues to monitor the situation.
- Ledger
- ZCG is in conversations with Ledger, hoping to receive a draft proposal this week.
- It’s ZCG’s view that the Zcash community shouldn’t have to pay to fix anything but there may be a cost for feature development.
- Zingo
- Need to restructure milestone 3. ZCG to discuss with Zancas.
- BTCPayServer plugin:
- Developer preparing to start work on the final milestone. Artkor will test in the coming days and then it will be released. Delivery is more than a month ahead of the grant schedule. Documentation underway and then outreach to merchants will begin.
- Shoutout:
Shoutout to Artkor for kicking off this thread on the Forum regarding transparent addresses.