Milestone 6 Report - June 2026
Hi Zcashers 
Here is our June 2026 milestone report for the Zk Av Club Community Media Infrastructure & Support grant.
Report Snapshot
- Grant: Zcash Community Media Infrastructure & Support: Zk Av Club 2026
- Reporting period: June 2026
- Milestone: 6
- Milestone status: In progress
- Overall grant status: On track
- Progress made this month: backlog publishing, watchz.cash curation, workshop programming, Berlin Blockchain Week recordings, Swarm livestreaming, DWeb Camp planning, archive preparation, and post-production coordination
June Overview
June was a full production month for Zk Av Club. We brought the Recording Station back to Berlin Blockchain Week, released four videos from the 2025 backlog, prepared the Zcash Playlist Challenge for broader participation, and got ready for the DWeb Camp Recording Station activation in July.
Berlin also made the next phase of the project feel more real. We tested stronger roles, Swarm livestreaming, private guest intake, archive preparation, and a steadier release rhythm.
The tradeoff is that slower self-hosted/platform work and the public outputs dashboard stayed on hold while we focused on recordings, releases, crew support, and getting archive work into better shape.
Video Releases
In June, we released four videos from the Berlin Blockchain Week 2025 Recording Station backlog. The weekly release cycle gives Zk Av Club a steadier rhythm for publishing selected recordings.
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Free Association: Rüzgar on Mutual Recognition and Building Post-Capitalist Economies
Rüzgar introduces Free Association as a framework for mutual recognition, inalienable recognition power, and rethinking how value and resources flow between people. X / Zcash Forum / BlueSky
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Crypto Grants and Community Building Across Ethereum, Zcash, and Polygon
Hudson reflects on grants, incentive alignment, social capital, anonymity, and lessons from a decade across Ethereum, Zcash, and Polygon. X / Zcash Forum / BlueSky
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Worldbuilding as Infrastructure: The Cultural Layer of Web3
Fotis and Dayvan explore speculative fiction, gaming culture, placelessness, sensemaking, and the imaginative foundations of Web3. X / Zcash Forum / BlueSky
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Designing the Commons: Beth and Josh on Community and Political Infrastructure in Web3
Beth and Josh discuss relational community infrastructure, political economy as a design space, and alternatives to crypto financialization. X / Zcash Forum / BlueSky
watchz.cash and the Zcash Playlist Challenge
As part of our work on watchz.cash, we prepared the Zcash Playlist Challenge for broader community participation.
The challenge invites community members to create a YouTube playlist of the 25 most important Zcon presentations. The goal is not only to collect personal favorites, but to help surface the talks that best represent Zcash history, technical development, governance, community building, and long-term ecosystem context.
Check out the announcement thread for details and how to participate.
Workshops at the End of June
- Como transcrever e traduzir simultaneamente ao vivo | Akkadu com OBS
- Date: June 29, 2026, 22:00 UTC
- Hosts: Pac and Iogy
- Language: Portuguese
- Description: A practical workshop on installing, configuring, and integrating Akkadu with OBS for live transcription and simultaneous translation of events, meetings, and talks, as seen at Zcomm 2026 by Zcash Foundation earlier this year.
- Construye tu mundo con AFFiNE
- Date: June 30, 2026, 22:00 UTC
- Hosts: Yendira and Aura
- Language: Spanish
- Description: A basic workshop on using AFFiNE as an open-source, privacy-focused workspace for notes, docs, whiteboards, local-first data ownership, and creative worldbuilding.
Workshops in July
In July, we kick off the new season of Zk Av Club Workshops with two tracks:
- Zcash
- Sovereign Tech
Aura and Roosevelt, our Workshop Coordinators, are leading the workshop program for the new July–December season. They are designing the curriculum and schedule for both tracks, coordinating facilitator support, and helping make workshops a steadier part of the club.
The workshop program now has a clearer shape from July through December.
The Zcash track focuses on hands-on Zcash operations and tooling, including nodes, wallets, payments, network privacy, and self-custody.
The Sovereign Tech track focuses on community-controlled digital tools, including archiving, decentralized media, private communications, encrypted collaboration, self-hosted platforms, and safer browsing.
The July workshop program will include:
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Run Zcash: Zebra — A practical workshop focused on running Zcash infrastructure with Zebra, hosted at the Zk Av Club Recording Station at DWeb Camp.
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Introducing Omeka S: Community archiving using open-source digital archive display and management software — An introduction to Omeka S as a tool for community archiving, digital collections, and public archive display.
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Onboarding to Omeka S: Establishing community archiving workflows with open-source digital archive display and management software — A follow-up workshop focused on setting up practical community archiving workflows using Omeka S.
Berlin Blockchain Week 2026
Zk Av Club took the Recording Station to several Berlin Blockchain Week events:
- Test setup, including a livestream into the Zcash Friday Lounge
- Neocypherpunk Summit by Web3Privacy Now
- Dappcon by Gnosis
- The Blockspäti by WebZero and Zcash
- Privacy Matters by BREW
The test setup helped us check the gear, signal flow, and livestream setup before the public recordings, and share part of that process live with the Zcash Friday Lounge.
This was our fourth Recording Station activation overall and our second Berlin Blockchain Week activation. Last year, we participated in five Berlin Blockchain Week events, including Dappcon, and later published a full recap of that work.
This year helped us sharpen how the Recording Station works in the field: clearer roles, stronger consent and archive preparation, better post-production coordination, and a stronger connection between live event recordings, weekly releases, and long-term preservation.
We already know that the Recording Station works. The next challenge is making it easier for more people to run, improve, and carry forward.
Gratitude to the Berlin Crew
Detailed field notes from the Berlin Blockchain Week activation will follow separately, but this report must clearly state: the Recording Station was a community effort.
Heartfelt thanks to @robmarn, @j32804, @zerodartz, @IrenaS, Rylan, Dirk, and Paolo! You all showed up with skill, patience, good instincts, and serious care for the work. The Recording Station is a living system, and Berlin worked because this crew kept it alive, moving, and connected to the people around it.
Thank you also to the event teams who made space for us across the week: Web3Privacy Now, Gnosis, @webzero, and BREW. Special thanks to @readymouse and @fabacab for everything they did to connect The Blockspäti to Zcash sponsorship!
And, of course, thank you to Zcash Community Grants for funding the work that made this whole thing possible.
Swarm Livestreaming
One of the most important developments from Berlin Blockchain Week was strengthening our connection with Swarm and successfully livestreaming twice on the Swarm network.
This mattered because it connected the Recording Station more directly to decentralized media distribution. Both livestreams were also celebrated by the Swarm team on X:
The two livestream replays are currently available here:
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Zk Av Club on Swarm
- Replay: Swarm livestream replay 1
- Description: A conversation about what Zk Av Club was doing at Berlin Blockchain Week, why the Recording Station matters, and why livestreaming through Swarm is exciting for community media infrastructure.
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Viktor, Mina, and Ksenya on Swarm
- Replay: Swarm livestream replay 2
- Description: A deeper discussion of Swarm, including how it relates to decentralized media, livestreaming, and the possibility of more sovereign distribution paths for projects like Zk Av Club.
For now, these replays are hosted by the Swarm team and may not remain available indefinitely. We are currently preparing to launch a dedicated Zk Av Club channel on Swarm so we can stream there directly in the future.
Big thanks to Ksenya for helping make this Swarm connection real. She organized our first attempt to stream on Swarm at Dappcon last year, and worked hard behind-the-scenes to help organize both successful Swarm streams during Berlin Blockchain Week this year.
This will be covered more fully in the Berlin Blockchain Week field notes, but it is important enough to include here because it points toward a more sovereign media path for Zk Av Club.
Workflow Development
June clarified more structure behind the Recording Station.
The active model now includes clearer responsibilities across:
- Production leadership: planning, coordination, creative direction, and contributor support.
- Technical direction: camera/audio setup, live monitoring, troubleshooting, file safety, and technical decision-making.
- Camera and audio operation: recording conversations cleanly, supporting multi-camera coverage, and running audio-only setups when useful.
- Guest and host coordination: finding guests and hosts, coordinating timing, and helping bring strong conversations into the archive.
- Consent and metadata: managing consent status, participant information, recording notes, and archive-ready metadata.
- Archive preparation: organizing files, metadata, provenance, consent status, and long-term preservation workflows.
- Storytelling and communications: shaping recordings into legible public media through context, titles, descriptions, summaries, release coordination, and public updates.
- Post-production: editing, audio cleanup, exports, transcripts, thumbnails, platform preparation, and release packaging.
The Recording Station worked because people were doing more than operating equipment. They helped bring conversations into the archive by coordinating timing, finding guests and hosts, managing consent and metadata, setting up and tearing down gear, supporting audio-only recordings, and keeping the production connected to the events around it.
Naming the work makes it easier to share, teach, improve, and protect the project from falling back into one-person bottlenecks.
Shielded Memo Guest Intake
One experiment this month was testing a Zcash shielded memo as a private expression-of-interest flow for people who wanted to record with us.
Instead of asking people to write contact information on a public signup sheet, we posted a QR code for a Zcash address at The Blockspäti and invited people to send a shielded memo with their name or pseudonym, preferred contact method, and recording interest.
We did not receive any signups through shielded memo during the one day that we tested it. This showed us that the flow needs clearer on-site explanation, better timing, and probably more active facilitation if we want people to understand and use it during a busy event.
We plan to try the flow again at DWeb Camp and Zcon7.
Recording Station Media Pipelines
June clarified the need to describe the Recording Station media pipeline more precisely.
There are two related but separate paths:
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Free and open-source media archive: The promise of the Recording Station is free and open-source media: source material that can be organized, preserved, shared, and reused by the community.
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Post-production and release: Some recordings move from the archive into edited releases, descriptions, platform publishing, and promotion, but that is not the only measure of success.
The Recording Station is community media infrastructure. A conversation can be valuable before it becomes a finished public release, as long as the source material is handled responsibly and made available through the archive.
Audio-Only Releases
There is clear demand for audio-only versions of Recording Station conversations, including conversations originally recorded at the Video Station. One community member asked directly whether Zk Av Club content is available in podcast form, which reinforces that this should become part of our release and archive planning.
We have not yet finalized an audio archive, release, or distribution plan. That is now a clear next step. We need to decide how audio-only outputs should be edited, described, published, and connected back to the broader Recording Station archive.
Backlog Status
Backlog exists in both paths. The archive side includes source material from earlier activations and events, including Dark Prague, Sub0, and Devconnect. The release side includes selected recordings moving toward publication, including the Berlin Blockchain Week 2025 videos now being released weekly.
The backlog is moving because more people are now supporting specific parts of the work.
In June, Irena’s work as Archivist helped strengthen organization, metadata attention, and archive preparation. Dayvan’s work as Storyteller helped strengthen titles, descriptions, context, and publication support. Robmar is coordinating community editors for the post-production pipeline, including @Omegaonchain, @PacDc, and @Dvdt3ddy.
We are still experimenting with different ways to coordinate this work, but the recent momentum is a good sign that the post-production pipeline is moving in the right direction.
Open Items
The main open items are:
- self-hosted/platform work, including Seafile and CryptPad, and the public outputs dashboard remain on hold;
- the shielded memo guest intake flow needs clearer explanation before the next test;
- audio-only release and archive planning still needs to be finalized;
- workshop logistics need final facilitator coordination and Zk Av Club participant coverage.
July Focus
In July, our primary focus will be the DWeb Camp Recording Station activation.
This will be a major activation for Zk Av Club and a chance to apply what we learned during Berlin Blockchain Week: clearer roles, better production planning, a more refined private signup process, stronger source material organization, and improved crew coordination.
In addition to DWeb Camp, Zk Av Club priorities in July are:
- process and organize Berlin Blockchain Week 2026 recordings for the free and open-source media archive;
- prepare backlog recordings for archive;
- continue the weekly release rhythm for selected backlog recordings;
- promote the Zcash Playlist Challenge and prepare for the Top 25 Zcon review process;
- continue discussions with the Swarm team about a dedicated Zk Av Club channel for future livestreams;
- develop audio-only distribution and archive plans for Audio Station and Video Station conversations;
- launch the new Zk Av Club Workshops season;
- finalize the workshop schedule and move forward with facilitator support;
- improve the workshop production process;
- test the shielded memo signup flow again at DWeb Camp.
Community Asks
Zk Av Club could use help with:
- guests, collaborators, and conversation ideas for the DWeb Camp Recording Station activation;
- editing and post-production support;
- transcript review and cleanup;
- participation in the Zcash Playlist Challenge by creating a Top 25 Zcon presentations playlist;
- participation in the upcoming Zcash and Sovereign Tech workshops;
- feedback from ZCG and forum readers on what would make monthly reports easier to evaluate.
Closing
June strengthened the Recording Station as both a production format and an archive path.
The next test is DWeb Camp: running a major activation with clearer roles and a more refined private signup process.
July will also test the broader flow: moving the first batch of recordings into the archive, continuing weekly releases, and launching a more structured workshop program.
Thanks to everyone helping make this work possible.