Thank you Zk Av Club, these Recording Station videos/audio clips are so vaulable, and will be more so in the future. I haven’t had time to watch them all yet, but I will. Thanks for the hardwork. 
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Greetings, community!
We kick off the month of July with a new workshop as part of our Community Workshops program.
Omeka S is an open-source, self-hostable digital archive display and management tool. In this workshop we will look at how Omeka S can be used by communities to manage, maintain, and contribute to their own digital archive.
The workshop will:
- Introduce participants to digital archiving in general
- Discuss what metadata is and why it is important
- Discuss how to setup your own Omeka S instance with accompanying documentation
- Introduce and walk through a demo of Omeka S and its capabilities, including theming and the module ecosystem
- How to work with Omeka S together with the Internet Archive
- Demo custom built modules for integrating with Internet Archive collections
- Collaboratively sketch metadata structures
- Collaboratively sketch features for a bespoke Omeka S instance
- Expand the conceptual horizon of what digital archiving can mean
- Provide resources for self study
With this workshop you will:
- Learn the basics of Omeka S
- Learn about the wider field of digital archiving
- Contribute to shaping an instance of Omeka S for their own community archiving purposes
This will be the first in a 2 part workshop focused on Omeka S. The first workshop will lay the foundation, through collaborative sketching of metadata structures and instance features, for the deployment of a bespoke Omeka S instance that participants will work with in workshop two.
A guide for setting up your own instance of Omeka S will be provided before the workshop.
This workshop is facilitated by c-host, a digital archivist, artist, and researcher. Learn more about their work here: https://c-host.site
Want to learn more? Join us!
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The Community Workshops program continues to move forward!
Since last year, we’ve been experimenting with different workshop formats and styles that involve the community. We believe we’ve come close to establishing a consistent, monthly lineup of workshops covering two areas: on the one hand, topics related to audiovisual production, multimedia, and communications; and on the other, financial tools related to Zcash, wallets, and nodes.
With that in mind, the coordinators of the Zk Av Club’s Community Workshop Program have prepared a schedule of topics covering the workshops for July through December 2026.
| Month | Comm/Media | Level | Zcash | Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June | OBS + Akkadu | Intermediate | — | — |
| June | Affine | Beginner | — | — |
| July | Omeka | Beginner | — | — |
| July | Omeka | Intermediate | ZODL wallet | Beginner |
| August | Swarm | TBD | Zebra node | Intermediate |
| September | Mirotalk | Intermediate | Redbridge node | Intermediate |
| October | Cryptpad | Beginner | CypherPay/BTCPay | Intermediate |
| November | Peertube | Advanced | Nym | Intermediate |
| December | Privacy browsers | Beginner | Hardware wallets | Beginner |
The first workshops we held during the first half of the year helped us analyze the pros and cons of the process we’ve been shaping. Among these initial workshops, we can highlight the Git workshop, led by pacu, and the Signal workshop, led by Yoditar.
They exemplify what we aim to offer: experiential training activities led by expert facilitators who are proficient in the tool being taught, in a setting that allows for hands-on practice and the resolution of questions and concerns. In short, it is learning by doing—community-based learning.
What’s interesting about preparing the workshops for the July–December semester is that it has allowed us to identify community needs: tools that many community members don’t know how to use—or aren’t even familiar with—but it has also connected us with trending topics within our ecosystem, such as Nym, RedBridge, or Zebra nodes.
On behalf of the Workshop Coordinators team (me and @AuraBritoSM ) and the Zk Av Club, we hope everyone—facilitators and attendees alike—enjoys this experience, and we also hope that people will be empowered through the knowledge and use of new tools.
We are building not only a library of interviews and testimonials at the Recording Station, but also a library of educational content on the various tools that underpin the present and future of the Internet as we know it today.
Thank you all.
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Greetings, Zcashers!
We inform you that we have moved the date of the 2nd part of our workshop on Omeka S.
Please make your arrangements.
The new date is 7/28, at 17:00 UTC
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A new workshop!
We continue moving forward with our workshop program.
This time we announce a very special workshop:
Learn How to Use ZODL
The workshop will:
- Introduce participants to the core concepts of financial privacy and decentralized cash
- Discuss what a seed phrase is and why self-custody is critically important
- Discuss how to download, set up, and configure your own Zodl wallet with accompanying security best practices
- Introduce and walk through a live demo of Zodl and its capabilities, including sending and receiving unified addresses and managing shielded pools
- How to navigate the Zcash blockchain privately and understand transaction fees
- Demo the wallet’s key features for seamless, fast synchronization and daily transactions
- Collaboratively sketch a practical checklist for secure backup and personal asset management
- Collaboratively sketch features and ideas for local circular economies using mobile wallets
- Expand the conceptual horizon of what sovereign digital money can mean in the real world
- Provide resources for self-study and community onboarding
This workshop is facilitated by @NealJayu , a ZODL team member.
The date: 30/7, 15:00 UTC.
We look forward to seeing you to keep exploring valuable tools within our ecosystem.
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Join our first Workshop Program Update open to the community!
For the past few months, we have been organizing and facilitating workshops on open-source tools, privacy, and decentralized technologies. Now, we want to open up a portion of our weekly meetings to share with the entire community how the program is evolving.
In this first public edition, we will discuss:
Highlights from our July workshops.
What we have learned alongside our facilitators and participants.
Improvements we are currently implementing in the program.
The upcoming workshops we are preparing.
How you can get involved as an attendee, facilitator, or contributor.
If you have participated in any of our workshops, are interested in open-source software, or would like to share your knowledge with the community, this meeting is for you.
Date: Tuesday, July 21st
Time: 15:30 UTC
Link: Jitsi Meet
Agenda: CryptPad
More than just an update, we want this to be a space to talk, exchange ideas, and continue building the ZK AV Club Workshop Program together.
We look forward to seeing you there!
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Greetings, community!
The date of this ZODL workshop has changed. Keep an eye on your schedules!
The new date is:
Date: 7/30
Time: 15:30 UTC
Look here: https://www.youtube.com/live/CsjI388pKt0
See you at the workshop!
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Milestone 7 Report — July 2026
Hi Zcashers 
July Overview
July was a month of overlap, recovery, and follow-through for Zk Av Club. After Berlin Blockchain Week, much of the event crew moved almost directly into DWeb Camp. Now we’re securing recordings, organizing source material, following up with contributors, closing out expenses and documentation, and making room for the crews to understand what actually happened.
At the same time, the rest of the club kept moving. The Workshops team delivered three sessions, including two on Omeka S that left us with a working community archive instance. Post-production continued through Zk Av Club and ZecHub, while a late-June Berlin recording was published directly by the people who made it. Submissions for the Zcash Playlist Challenge also closed. Winners will be announced next month.
Different people were able to carry different parts of the work forward, even while the event crew was stretched across two major activations. The club is beginning to hold several kinds of work at once.
We aren’t ready to give a full account of either activation yet. Berlin changed how we think about crew roles, source-media stewardship, and what it takes to keep a large Recording Station moving. DWeb Camp gave us a chance to test that evolving model in a very different environment. Both deserve more reflection than we could give them while moving directly from one production into the next.
DWeb Camp Recording Station
Zk Av Club returned to DWeb Camp with a clearer crew structure and a better sense of what the Recording Station needs around it.
The activation is complete, and the source material is now being organized and sorted.
We’re holding back from a full assessment until the crew has had time to recap the experience together. A separate field report will cover what we made, which parts of the production model held up, how the camp differed from Berlin Blockchain Week, and what we’d change next time.
One part of DWeb Camp we can share now is a feature created by Arikia and the team at CTRL+X: a two-page center spread about Zk Av Club in Samizdat Dezentral, the first DWeb newspaper.
The spread traces a history much larger than this latest activation. Its photographs move from Zcon Sessions in Barcelona and the planning circles at DWeb Camp Brazil in 2023, through the Migration Station at DWeb Camp California in 2024, the full Recording Station at DevConnect Buenos Aires in 2025, and our work at Berlin Blockchain Week 2026.
Together, the images show how Zk Av Club grew from the Zcash and DWeb communities and gradually took shape as a community archive practice, a public-goods media project, and an ongoing experiment in free and open-source media.
Massive gratitude to Arikia and the entire CTRL+X team for creating the spread and giving Zk Av Club such a generous place in the first DWeb newspaper. Thanks as well to @zerodartz, @autotunafish, and @j32804, whose on-location photography across these activations made it possible to tell the club’s story in images.
Post-Production and Releases
July included one long-form Recording Station release from Zk Av Club and two collaborations released by ZecHub.
Fork Around and Find Out: DAOs, Network States, and Self-Governance in Crypto
Wassim Alsindi, Nick Almond, and Fatemeh Fannizadeh explore DAOs, network states, “code is law,” and how communities govern themselves in practice.
Collaborations with ZecHub
Harry Halpin on Nym, Zcash, and Network-Level Privacy — Dark Prague
Harry Halpin discusses why private digital money also needs protection at the network layer and how Nym and Zcash approach different parts of that problem.
DappCon: ZK Loyalty & FHE with GiraeffleAeffle
Max introduces ZK Loyalty, an anonymous loyalty program designed to help small businesses reward customers without collecting unnecessary personal data.
Creator Publication from Late June
At the end of June, @readymouse and @fabacab also published their Blockspäti recording through their own channel.
Violet and Justine with ZK AV Club at Berlin Blockchain Week 2026
Violet and Justine discuss financial independence, banned or frozen payment accounts, and how privacy tools can support people excluded from conventional financial services.
This is another good example of the Recording Station working as source-media infrastructure. A recording doesn’t always need to be published by Zk Av Club to become a meaningful community output.
Zk Av Club Workshops
Workshops coordinators @aurabritosm and @gordonestv kept the program moving through July. The month’s workshops included two sessions on Omeka S community archiving and an introduction to the ZODL wallet.
The program also received encouraging feedback following June’s Affine workshop. One participant wrote:
“Hasta ahora vamos por la primera sesión pero me encantó la potencialidad de la herramienta, sobre todo a nivel colaborativo.”
“We’ve only had the first session so far, but I loved the tool’s potential, especially for collaboration.”
Preparing and running the workshops this month also helped refine how we produce them. The team strengthened moderator preparation, developed better contingency plans for connectivity problems, and created a dedicated Workshop Tech role for sessions involving self-hosted software. The new role is already making preparation more structured and helping us take on technically ambitious workshops.
The Omeka S series left the club with a working instance at archive.zkav.club. It currently holds demo content, which we’ll remove as we begin adding actual Recording Station artifacts to the free and open-source media archive.
We also launched a monthly public program update call to share changes, gather feedback, and document how the program develops. The call will take place on the third Tuesday of each month at 15:30 UTC.
Introducing Omeka S: Community Archiving
An introduction to using the open-source, self-hostable Omeka S platform to preserve, manage, and share community archives.
Onboarding to Omeka S: Establishing Community Archiving Workflows
A hands-on follow-up focused on editing metadata, contributing archival material, and testing community-defined workflows in a deployed Omeka S archive.
Learn to Use ZODL
An introduction to using the privacy-first ZODL mobile wallet to send, receive, and protect ZEC.
PeerTube, watchz.cash and the Zcash Playlist Challenge
The submission period for the Zcash Playlist Challenge has ended.
Later in August, we’ll announce the winners and publish our selection of the Top 25 Most Important Zcon Presentations. That selection will seed watchz.cash with a curated first collection of Zcon presentations.
The full Zcon video history will also be backed up to Internet Archive. We currently expect that work to happen in September.
Grant Status Snapshot
| Area | Where things stand |
|---|---|
| Recording Station | The DWeb Camp activation is complete, and the source material is being organized and sorted. The Berlin Blockchain Week and DWeb Camp field reports are still to come. |
| Post-production and releases | July brought one Zk Av Club release and two collaborations with ZecHub. A late-June Blockspäti recording was also published through the creators’ own channel. |
| Free and open-source media archive | Source-material organization continued, and the working Omeka S instance is being prepared for actual Recording Station artifacts. It still contains demo content. |
| Zk Av Club Workshops | Three July workshops were completed. The program introduced the Workshop Tech role, improved contingency planning for connectivity problems, and launched a monthly public update. |
| Community Fund | The fund continued supporting event production, workshops, post-production, and contributor roles. A report on its first six months is planned for August. |
| PeerTube / watchz.cash | Playlist Challenge submissions have closed. The winners and Top 25 Most Important Zcon Presentations are planned for August, with the Top 25 becoming the first collection on watchz.cash. |
| Public outputs dashboard | The dashboard is on hold indefinitely and isn’t part of our near-term plans. |
What Remains Open
Most of the open work is follow-through from July and the two recent activations:
- continuing to organize and sort the DWeb Camp source material;
- recapping DWeb Camp with the crew;
- completing the Berlin Blockchain Week and DWeb Camp field reports;
- preparing the Omeka S instance and archive workflows for actual Recording Station artifacts;
- reviewing the July Workshops cycle with the coordinators.
We’ll keep this work moving at a pace that gives the people and material involved the attention they need.
August Focus
In August, we’ll turn July’s activity into documentation, releases, and infrastructure the club can keep using.
We’ll focus on:
- continuing the follow-through from Berlin Blockchain Week and DWeb Camp;
- announcing the Playlist Challenge winners and publishing the Top 25 Most Important Zcon Presentations as the first collection on watchz.cash;
- preparing the free and open-source media archive to begin receiving actual Recording Station artifacts;
- keeping post-production and Workshops moving while publishing the first six-month Community Fund activity report.
Gratitude
Thank you to the DWeb Camp organizers, the Recording Station crew, Workshop contributors, audio/video editors, ZecHub collaborators, and everyone who supported the work over the last month.
A very special thank you to @robmarn, whose responsibility, consistency, and care strengthened both the Berlin Blockchain Week and DWeb Camp activations immensely.
I’m personally grateful for what everyone brought and for the flexibility and care that kept different parts of the club moving through a particularly gnarly stretch.
July closed a demanding period of field production. We’re now sorting through what we made, completing the documentation we owe, and preparing for what comes next (#zcon).
Thanks to Zcash Community Grants and the wider Zcash community for continuing to support this work.
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I feel proud to be part of this giant monster that is the Zk Av Club. We keep moving forward, learning and adjusting, but above all, leaving a legacy of content and education around this technology.
Thank you!
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We’re continuing to make progress, Zcashers!
Here’s our schedule of community workshops for the second half of 2026. We’ve got some great topics coming up.
We’ll share more updates and exact dates for the upcoming workshops soon. Stay tuned!
| Month | Comm/Media | Level | Zcash | Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June | OBS + Akkadu | Intermediate | — | — |
| June | Affine | Beginner | — | — |
| July | Omeka | Beginner | — | — |
| July | Omeka | Intermediate | ZODL wallet | Beginner |
| August | Mirotalk | Intermediate | Zebra node | Intermediate |
| September | Swarm | Beginner | Redbridge node | Intermediate |
| October | Cryptpad | Beginner | CypherPay/BTCPay | Beginner |
| November | Peertube | Beginner | Nym | Intermediate |
| December | Privacy browsers | Beginner | Hardware wallets | Beginner |
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ZK AV Club Monthly Community Workshops Open Call
A new meeting, Zcashers!
Over the past months, we’ve been organizing and facilitating workshops around open-source tools, privacy, decentralized technologies, and other topics relevant to the Zcash ecosystem. These monthly open calls are an opportunity to share what we’re working on, discuss upcoming activities, exchange ideas, and continue building the workshop program together.
In this edition, we’ll talk about:
Recent workshop highlights and lessons learned.
Upcoming workshops and activities.
New workshop ideas and potential facilitators.
Updates to the workshop program and coordination process.
Ways for community members to get involved, contribute, or host a workshop.
This is an open meeting for anyone interested in learning, teaching, sharing knowledge, or contributing to the ZK AV Club Workshop Program.
More than just a monthly update, this is a space for the community to connect, exchange ideas, and help shape what comes next.
Date: 9/25
Time: 15:30 UTC
Location: Online — Jitsi Meet
Meeting link: Jitsi Meet
Agenda: CryptPad (feel free to add topics or quiestions)
We’d love to see you there and continue building the ZK AV Club Workshop Program together!
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One beginner-friendly workshop idea could be how to choose a Zcash wallet based on what someone wants to do—shielded payments, transparent transfers, buying ZEC, or managing ZEC alongside other assets.
New users may see several wallet choices without understanding the differences. A simple comparison that includes Gem Wallet as a multichain option with transparent ZEC support, alongside wallets focused on shielded use, could help newcomers choose what suits them.
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Yea, a multi-wallet overview is a nice fit for Zk Av Club Workshops.
We’ll keep it in mind as we design the 2027 Zcash track.
Thanks for sharing.
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ZK AV Club Workshop: Start Your Zebra Node!
Want to take the next step toward running your own Zcash node?
The ZK AV Club Community Workshops are back with a new intermediate-level workshop focused on Zebra, the Rust implementation of the Zcash node software.
This session will be led by our facilitator @arya2 , who will guide participants through the practical process of setting up and running a Zebra node, while explaining the key concepts behind node operation and synchronization.
Running nodes is an important part of maintaining a decentralized, resilient, and privacy-preserving Zcash network. This workshop is an opportunity to move beyond theory and get hands-on with the infrastructure that helps keep the network running.
No need to be a Zebra expert — just bring some basic knowledge of Zcash, blockchain concepts, and the command line.
Learn. Run your node. Support Zcash.
Set your reminder: https://youtu.be/KKIPXNvbjqk
We hope to see you there!
Date: 9/10
Time: 17:00 UTC
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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.
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Great job team! I’m so proud to be part 
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Hello, community! From Zk Av Club we have a new invitation for all of you:
Ready to explore blockchain interoperability and learn how to run a Red·Bridge Node? 
Join the ZK AV Club for a hands-on community workshop where we’ll explore Red·Bridge Node, its architecture, how it connects Zcash and Avalanche, node setup, configuration, synchronization, and practical operation.
What you’ll learn:
Red·Bridge Node architecture and interoperability.- Zcash and Avalanche integration.
Node installation, configuration, and management.
Practical tools, commands, and troubleshooting.
Date: October 15, 2026
Time: 16:00 UTC
Join us!
Red·Bridge: https://www.rbra.net/
Explore the Demo: red·bridge Demo
Whether you’re a developer, node operator, or blockchain enthusiast, come learn, experiment, and connect with the community!
Build. Connect. Learn together. 
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We’re back for the third part of our AFFiNE Workshop series! 
Join us as we continue exploring the world of AFFiNE, an open-source workspace that brings together documents, notes, visual boards, and AI-powered features in one place.
This time, we’re taking things a step further! We’ll dive deeper into the tool, explore more advanced features, discover new ways to organize our ideas, and learn how to make the most of AFFiNE to boost our creativity and productivity.
Whether you’ve joined our previous workshops or you’re just getting started, everyone is welcome! This is a great opportunity to learn, share experiences, ask questions, and grow together as a community passionate about open-source software, digital privacy, and digital sovereignty.
Workshop Details
Date: October 8, 2026
Time: 22:00 UTC
Watch live on YouTube:
Let’s learn, build, and grow together! Every step towards open-source tools and greater control over our digital lives makes a difference.
Subscribe to our channel and join the conversation: https://zkav.club/
See you at the workshop! 
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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.
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Greetings, everyone!
We’re hosting a new monthly call to share updates, plans, and achievements from our Community Workshops program with all of you.
Bring your questions! Bring your proposals!
We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Time: 14:00 UTC
Link: Jitsi Meet
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