Part 2
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Applicant requests a grant for six full-depth explainers on NU7 candidate ZIPs — section-by-section spec readings with original diagrams, affected parties, and strongest objections stated plainly — published open access under CC BY 4.0, mirrored to the forum, with source in a public repo. Requesting $7,500.
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Artkor: I think the idea is fine, but AI can already do this at whatever level of complexity the user wants. I reject.
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Paul: Also, continuing to emphasize that OpenZcash already has that function. I reject.
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Zerodartz: I also reject, since I don’t see enough new value in it as AI can help understand ZIPs much easier.
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Gguy: It may sound simple up front, but what I sometimes see with projects like this is that it can be very quick for things to become stale and require ongoing work for them to remain valuable. So there’s an issue on both ends: is someone going to maintain this long term, and if they are, is that a task better automated with systems that exist today? While I agree there is value, unfortunately I’m going to decline this one today.
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Declined
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Applicant requests a grant to package a completed bilingual golden-oracle verification methodology as a reusable toolkit for Zcash developers, and complete a production-scale instantiation (full Poseidon rounds, production SMT depth, epoch at k=476 / 6.4M constraints) — built on top of an already-verified Pasta curve proof system (41 modules, 34 passing gates, 1,032 test cases, 162 defects caught during development). Requesting $150,000.
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Artkor: Given the amount being requested, I think we should get input from someone like Sean, who is directly working on Ragu. He’s probably the right person to tell us whether this work would actually be useful for Zcash or not.
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Hanh: We can ask him. I think the main thing is that R1CS is a very old system that has been superseded by PLONK and Halo, so I’m not sure why we would use it.
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Gguy: Does Ragu use the same curves? This grant describes verified Pasta curve operations. The project description says they can be used for Tachyon and Ragu.
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Hanh: R1CS isn’t about the curve — it’s the arithmetization. I’m pretty sure it isn’t for Halo, because Halo has custom gates and R1CS doesn’t. I think Ragu is a constraint system, but it’s not R1CS, and I don’t understand what the value of this particular proposal is.
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Zerodartz: I think it has no real measurable value for Zcash.
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Hanh: On the forum, someone (forgot his name… s-crypto) says that Tachyon has superseded R1CS, and the applicant replies thanking him for confirming that Tachyon uses R1CS, which is the complete opposite of what was said.
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Gguy: That’s interesting, because he does not say that within the application. I’m not confident that this will deliver something that will end up in users hands, or that the system as described will work rather than be superseded by later technologies in the era of Tachyon and Ragu. Unless the applicant wants to come back and provide us with more details regarding our concerns about project deliverability and utility within Tachyon, I’m going to decline.
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Declined
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Zebra: auditing and closing the peer-supplied-count allocation class
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Applicant requests a grant to complete a systematic sweep of Zebra’s peer-supplied count allocation bug class — publishing a complete inventory across zebra-chain and zebra-network, upstream PRs for unbounded sites (beginning with issue #10566 and the connection.rs preallocation facet), and a regression harness enforcing the documented invariant — closing the class rather than remediating individual instances reactively. Requesting $28,000.
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Hanh: We asked the ZF developers to give us feedback, and based on their response I decline.
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Gguy: I struggle to see $28k of value in this, so I decline.
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Paul: Decline.
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Zerodartz: Decline.
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Artkor: Me too.
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Declined
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Human readable version of Ironwood formal verification, first steps - bulletproofs in the AGM
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Applicant requests a small forward grant to write a 6–8 page mathematical note presenting the simplified bulletproofs protocol proof (using the Algebraic Group Model) contained in the Ironwood formal verification Lean code — making the proof human-readable and citable as a standalone academic contribution. Requesting $8,000.
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Hanh: To me it was very strange, and I would approve because I’m curious to see what’s next. In itself I don’t see much value, but it could be the beginning of a beautiful story.
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Gguy: I would approve. Because of the reasonable ask I am willing to fund this.
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Paul: I’m going to abstain from this one.
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Artkor: I think it’s interesting and I hope it works out.
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Hanh: I’m really curious to see how he’s going to pull it off, because it’s a human-readable version of the Ironwood formal verification, and there are very few things more complicated than that. The first step is bulletproofs in the Algebraic Group Model. It’s also only the first part: to understand the whole Ironwood work this is just step one, and considering how hard step one is, I wonder what steps two and three look like.
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Zerodartz: I would consider it a success if I can read the outcome and understand exactly how part of Ironwood works. I am a bit mixed on the larger scale impact of it. Approve.
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Approved (Abstained: Paul)
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Zcash Selected-Payment Receipts SDK
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Applicant proposes an open-source Selected-Payment Receipts SDK — user-controlled, scoped evidence export for individual shielded payments, with a defined evidence format, local export with disclosure preview, independent verification library/CLI, reference wallet, and consuming reference application — explicitly narrower than viewing keys and explicitly not claiming to prove payer identity. Requesting $42,000.
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Hanh: This is the one where he wants a protocol that allows people to verify a transaction payment by giving the outgoing cipher key. Last time we talked about this, what I said is that there is something similar in Sapling, and maybe even in Sprout: a ZIP was opened but never implemented. I was wondering why it was never implemented, considering that it doesn’t seem to be very hard, and it’s been a long time — we’ve had Orchard and Ironwood since. So maybe we are missing some difficulty or some privacy edge case.
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Gguy: While I’m a big supporter of receipts like this, and I do know there have been ZIPs for it, we haven’t actually seen any implementation in a wallet. I think this is the type of thing that usually needs to come out of a wallet team. I’m not sure a third-party SDK is necessarily going to get wallet integration. If there is interest in this, I’d like to see one of the wallet teams show their support for a project like this.
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Hanh: For me, as a wallet developer, I’m not super keen on implementing this, because I would need to have a ZIP — not because it’s hard. It’s more that I’m concerned it’s going to break privacy in some subtle way. It’s really not hard: if you give your outgoing cipher key, you can decrypt.
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Gguy: Correct, and I imagine many other wallet developers would have similar views. It can be very hard to adopt third-party SDKs like this while trying to protect your users.
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Paul: I’m interested, but I agree. I’d like to see a ZIP and coordination with the protocol developers.
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Hanh: We could ask him, if he’s interested in being funded, to take over ownership of the ZIP and make it Ironwood-compatible. As it is, it would be declined, and if he does something it would be very different, so he might as well open a new proposal.
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Gguy: Agreed. Let’s decline this one today.
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Declined
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P2P Cash-to-ZEC Onboarding via Bank CDMs
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Applicant requests a grant to build a cash-deposit-machine (CDM) based P2P ZEC on/off-ramp for India — physical cash at bank kiosks paired with shielded ZEC payouts to unified addresses, using NEAR smart contract escrow, a $10,000 bootstrapped liquidity pool, and a ZEC buyback treasury funded by protocol fees. Requesting $40,500.
- Remains open
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Zebra-Native Non-Custodial Mining Stack
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Applicant requests a grant to open-source and productionize a working non-custodial Zcash mining pool engine (live at zec.robotbase.cc since September 2026, Zebra v6.3.0, ZIP-244 mode-2 coinbase, 2,700+ shares at 99.7% valid rate), plus a validated independent deployment runbook and a public monitored lightwalletd endpoint with six-pool telemetry API. Requesting $19,500.
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Remains open
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Bitcointalk Signature Campaign & ZEC Community Engagement
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Applicant requests a grant for a 3-month Bitcointalk signature campaign — 40 high-rank accounts (Legendary, Hero, Sr. Member) carrying a Zcash banner for 12 weeks (~14,400 banner-carrying posts), plus three monthly ZEC price prediction contests ($1,000 prize pool each, entries requiring a shielded address). Requesting $90,000.
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Artkor: In my view this is one of the worst forms of paid promotion.
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Zerodartz: Agreed, this in no way is worth it.
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Declined
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Zcash Africa Privacy Engineering Residency Pilot
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Applicant proposes a 6-month Zcash Africa Privacy Engineering Residency Pilot — a staged funnel from online discovery (150+ applicants → 75 foundation) through technical academy (40), physical residency in Lagos (25), build challenge (10–15 teams, 5–8 prototypes), and 3 months post-residency support — targeting privacy-preserving payment use cases for African contexts (mobile money, remittances, merchant payments, aid). Requesting $49,000.
- Remains open
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Independent Recomputation of the Zcash Supply Ledger, including the NU7 NSM Reserve
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Applicant requests a grant to build an independent NSM reserve and supply accounting tool — a command-line recomputer fed only raw block bytes (getblock 0), reconciled height-by-height against Zebra and Zakura, with test vectors for ZIP 259’s open “Add reference implementations and test vectors” issue, a full-history ledger, Testnet/Mainnet NU7 block-by-block reconciliation, and a proposal to run daily verification after Zebra’s weekly Mainnet sync. Requesting $50,000.
- Remains open
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Mexico Tech Week October 2026 - Zcash México
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Applicant proposes a ~50-person masquerade-themed Zcash community event on October 31 as part of México Tech Week — introductory talk, expert privacy panel, ZEC quiz with prizes, live music, costume contest, networking with food/drinks, and ZEC distribution to attendees — pre-approved on the México Tech Week calendar pending venue confirmation. Requesting $7,980.
- Remains open
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Zcash Privacy Ecosystem Mapping & Adoption Data
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Applicant requests a grant to close the measurement gaps explicitly flagged in the June 2026 summit edition — live wallet testing on real devices with real funds (time-to-first-shielded-transaction, proof generation time, sync behavior, error rates), reproducible derivation of the shielded adoption figure, and an updated ecosystem mapping — published as standalone open datasets under CC BY 4.0. Requesting $5,000.
- Remains open
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Shielded x402: private machine payments for Zcash
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Applicant requests a grant to bring shielded ZEC into the x402 AI agent payment ecosystem — delivering a “Shielded x402” specification mapping x402 semantics to Zcash shielded transfers, a reference facilitator with testnet demo, and zshield-spendguard (spend limits, allowlists, audit trail for shielded agent wallets). Requesting $42,000.
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Gguy: While I’m very open to funding Agentic AI work this is not one of them. ZCG is not ready to fund projects in this way yet. We are also aware that this agent has been contacting other users inappropriately. Declined.
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Declined
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Zcash Türkiye University Tour 2026 — ZCG Grant Proposal
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Applicant proposes a 10-university pilot campus tour (~3,360 km across Istanbul, Bursa, Kayseri, Elazığ, Muş, and Van over ~30 days) — Zcash 101 presentations, Zodl wallet setup with first shielded transaction, starter ZEC incentive, quiz, networking, and a Campus Representative selected from each university with a follow-up online event within 30 days. Requesting $27,000.
- Remains open
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