Milestone 8 Report — August 2026
Greetings fellow Zcashers!
August Overview
August was a slower month for me. Personal responsibilities and some burnout meant I had less capacity than usual, and a few things I expected to follow up on after July didn’t happen.
Most of my time went into the historic Zcon video project.
We finished the research behind our Top 25 Most Important Zcon Videos, published the Playlist Challenge results, started adding videos to watchz.cash, recruited an archivist to lead preservation of the full collection, and designed and announced the Zcash 10th Birthday Short Film Festival.
Elsewhere, the club released two more Recording Station conversations, kept organizing archive material from Dark Prague and Buenos Aires, delivered Affine Part 2, prepared the Zebra workshop, and published our Berlin Blockchain Week field report.
Zcon Video Archive
Top 25 & Playlist Challenge
The Top 25 is live:
Graphic design by @zilk
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAk91cn5Gk6k
The Playlist Challenge submissions gave us a starting point for deeper research. From there, we worked through transcripts and historical context, compared overlapping talks, looked at what happened afterward, and built an independent editorial ranking.
We also finished scoring the challenge:
Dnilshon1 — 16 points — 1 ZEC
farad — 15 points — 1 ZEC
Aminag — 13 points — 1 ZEC
Thanks again to everyone who dug through years of Zcon talks and made a list.
Full results:
We’ve been documenting the research process along the way so it can eventually become a reusable method for working with historical video archives.
Zcash 10th Birthday Short Film Festival
We also designed and announced the Zcash 10th Birthday Short Film Festival this month.
Graphic design by @zilk
If you want to make something with Zcash history, dig into the Zcon collection, find a story worth telling, and turn it into a short film for Zcash’s 10th birthday.
We’ve picked an initial Top 40 collection for watchz.cash, and uploads have started. In September, we’ll finish adding those videos so participants have a curated set of source material they can watch, download, and reuse.
Preserving the Full Collection
We recruited an archivist to lead preservation of the complete historic Zcon collection. They start in September.
Before the end of the year, we want all historic Zcon videos on Internet Archive using the best-quality source we have, with new metadata and a dedicated Omeka S instance that makes the collection easier to browse and use.
That archive is separate from archive.zkav.club, which is for Recording Station material.
Recording Station
August brought two more long-form releases.
Signal and Cipher: Roos on Ham Radio and PGP at Dark Prague
Roos talks about ham radio, PGP, mathematics, and cultures where understanding the technology is part of using it.
Embrace Variety: Ira on Web3 Reputation for Developer-Founders
Ira talks about what happens when Web3 projects borrow branding that doesn’t fit who they actually are.
Three more long-form conversations are lined up for imminent release, with many more videos moving through post-production and metadata behind them.
The Dark Prague 2025 material is documented, with YAML metadata and recording identifiers ready for Internet Archive. The first Buenos Aires material has also been sorted and documented.
We’re tightening the release/archive workflow and working through consent questions around publication and reuse.
archive.zkav.club itself didn’t advance this month.
Berlin Blockchain Week Field Report
We also published our Berlin Blockchain Week field report:
One of the clearest things from Berlin was seeing more people run the Recording Station. Club regulars took on more of the setup and recording workflow, and three newcomers with little or no production experience joined in too.
We also got decentralized livestreaming with Swarm working after last year’s failed attempt.
The DWeb Camp crew retro and field report still haven’t happened, so we’re holding off on drawing conclusions from that activation.
Workshops
We delivered Affine Part 2 in August:
We also prepared Start Your Zebra Node, now scheduled for September 10, to be facilitated by @ZcashFoundation Engineer, Arya Solhi (@arya2):
The Workshops team adjusted the calendar around facilitator availability and kept improving what happens after each session. Changes to titles, SEO, and distribution helped bring more traffic to the ZODL recording.
One loose end from July: I said I’d put together a report on the Community Fund’s first six months. I didn’t get to it. It was an extra report, not a grant deliverable, and I shouldn’t have promised it when I didn’t have the capacity. I’m not carrying it forward as a September commitment.
September Focus
Our new Zcon archivist will start work on the full collection, including source reconciliation, Internet Archive preservation, new metadata, and the dedicated Omeka S archive.
We’ll finish publishing the Top 40 on watchz.cash so Short Film Festival participants have source videos they can watch, download, and reuse.
The Recording Station release/archive pipeline will keep moving with Dark Prague and Buenos Aires, and Workshops continues with Start Your Zebra Node on September 10.
Thanks to Zcash Community Grants and everyone helping us keep this work moving.
