September 2026 Milestone Report
September was the month we really shifted into Zcon7 mode.
Preparation for Cancún is taking most of my time and attention now, and that’ll continue through October. But a lot kept moving around it. WatchZ.cash got its first substantial collection, historic Zcon videos started making their way onto Internet Archive, six more Recording Station conversations went out, and the community post-production crew kept growing.
Zcon7
This month we opened a dedicated Zcon7 thread and started reaching out to people who want to curate conversations, host, or help us run the station.
Behind the scenes, we’re working through crew roles, scheduling, and production logistics for Cancún.
The Short Film Festival is coming with us too. Submissions close October 16, and the finalists will stream during Zcon on October 28, Zcash’s 10th birthday.
Zcon Archive + WatchZ.cash + Short Film Festival
The Zcon project crossed an important line this month. After months of research and curation, the work is starting to become something people can actually watch, explore, preserve, and make new things from.
We finished the initial Zcash History Through Zcon: Top 40 collection. It combines our Top 25 Most Important Zcon Videos with 15 more talks that open up more of the story across Zcash history, privacy, governance, community, and technical development.
Graphic design by @zilk
The Top 40 also became the first substantial collection on WatchZ.cash, the new PeerTube instance we’re setting up for the Zcash community.
For a community built around privacy, having a community-run video home that doesn’t default to YouTube matters. WatchZ.cash gives us an open-source place to publish and curate Zcash video, and makes that media easier to browse, download, share, and reuse.
For the Zcash 10th Birthday Short Film Festival, we published a practical guide for digging into the archive, finding a story, organizing source material, logging useful moments, and getting an edit started.
Preservation of the full historic Zcon collection has started too. Our Zcon Archivist now has example uploads from Zcon0, Zcon1, and Zcon2 Lite on Internet Archive, with a scripted ingest pipeline that uses consistent identifiers, preserves the original YouTube metadata, and checks uploads against the inventory. Here’s one of the first archive items.
The full video inventory still needs to be loaded before the collection can move through that pipeline at scale. The dedicated Zcon Omeka S archive will come after the Internet Archive ingest.
These systems are meant to complement each other. Internet Archive gives the historic collection a preservation home. WatchZ.cash gives people a place to watch and discover it. The dedicated Zcon Omeka S archive will eventually make the collection easier to browse, study, and research.
Recording Station
Six more Recording Station conversations came out in September.
The Dark Forest: DarkFi and Community-First Anonymous Software
Rachel-Rose O’Leary talks about DarkFi, a programmable anonymous L1, Lunarpunk, software simplicity, the Assange DAO, and her idea of the Dark Forest as a place where new movements can develop without being seen before they’re ready.
Getting Hacked into Security: Joe LeFever on Web3 Forensics and Auditing
Joe traces a decade in crypto from Bitcoin regulation and the ICO era to getting phished himself. That attack pulled him into blockchain forensics, smart contract auditing, and eventually starting his own security firm, Sicher Height.
The Unglamorous Crypto Play: Boring Businesses, On-Chain
Janine, founder of BIZZED AI, makes the case for cash-flowing small businesses as an overlooked crypto-adjacent asset class. The conversation covers AI due diligence, on-chain ownership, and some of the usability problems that still make self-custody difficult for most people.
A Decade Building Decentralised Payment Rails: Meinhard Benn
Meinhard looks back on ten years of connecting payment systems that weren’t designed to work together, from micropayments and SatoshiPay to open source and the decentralized web. Since this recording he’s launched Freedom Browser, and the conversation now reads like part of the foundation for that project.
Formal Verification in Noir: Language Design for the Future of ZK
Guillaume Claret, founder of Formal Land, talks about formal verification, zero-knowledge programming, and the design of Noir. He gets into proving code correct for every possible input, what Noir does and doesn’t need, and why open source matters for systems that need serious scrutiny.
Cultural Engineering and On-Chain Accountability
Bertrand explores on-chain accountability, trust, cultural engineering, the abstraction problem, and the shift from vibecoding to vibelearning. Underneath it is a bigger question about understanding why we’re building tools instead of only making them easier to use.
Programmable Cryptography: When ZK Drops the Cost of Trust
Sylve, co-founder of Hyli, talks about programmable cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and the idea of dropping the cost of trust. The conversation moves from Zcash and Ethereum rollups to Noir, StarkWare, and the tradeoffs between building blockchains around ZK proofs versus adding proofs to systems that weren’t designed for them. Underneath it is a bigger question about trust itself: not eliminating it, but giving people better tools to extend it on their own terms.
We now have four editors from the Zcash community steadily helping with post-production, and we’re working to onboard a couple more before Zcon7. Editing is being shared across contributors, while metadata, thumbnails, publishing, and archive work move through their own handoffs.
The Storyteller process is getting more modular and transferable too. We’re building reusable guidance for metadata and release preparation so describing each conversation doesn’t have to start from scratch.
Dark Prague preservation is moving onto Internet Archive too. Bitpunk, ExiledSurfer, and Rachel-Rose O’Leary are now archived. After the first browser uploads proved painfully slow, the Archivist moved to a command-line workflow that significantly improved transfer speeds.
The handoff is getting cleaner too. Release metadata and archive metadata now have their own workflows, while the Storyteller and Archivist coordinate priorities, metadata deadlines, and speaker information. Sub0 and Devconnect 2025 recordings are next in the archive pipeline.
The DWeb Camp crew retrospective and field report still haven’t happened, so I’m holding off on trying to package lessons from that activation.
Workshops
Arya from the Zcash Foundation hosted a workshop on September 10, “Running a Zcash Node with Zebra.” Whether you’re looking to run your first Zebra node or want to strengthen your understanding of node operation, this video is a great place to start.
The Workshops team is also taking more of the production into its own hands. Starting this month, the team began making thumbnails and other graphics directly, and pre-recorded segments are becoming a useful production backup.
October is deliberately front-loaded around Zcon7. Affine Part III is scheduled for October 8 with Yendira and RedBridge for October 15 with Kit, leaving the rest of the month open for Cancún.
Several other workshops have moved into 2027 planning instead of being forced into this year around current bottlenecks.
Infrastructure + Capacity
We decided to bring Jack on as Infrastructure Steward. He helped us with technical support during the Omeka S workshop and will start taking more of the club’s sysadmin and web operations work off my plate, including the dedicated Zcon Omeka instance.
Jack hasn’t had time to get deep into implementation yet. The important thing this month was making the role real. The goal isn’t just to keep the systems we already have running. It’s to create more capacity to build and steward the infrastructure the club needs without all of that work bottlenecking through me.
October
October is going to be a big one.
Before Cancún, we’ve got two workshops to run, a Short Film Festival submission window to close, more editors to bring into the fold, and a Recording Station to get ready for Zcon7.
Then we get to bring all of this into the same place: the archive, the films, the conversations, the people making them, and Zcash turning 10.
Some infrastructure and documentation work can wait until November. For now, we’re getting ready to make things together at Zcon7 and building the crew and workflow to get the conversations we record there out to people who can’t attend.
Thanks to Zcash Community Grants and everyone building this with us.
