Hello! time flies and my current grant is about to be completed. As I always say, I want to thank the Zcash Community Grants committee (all past and current members) and the community for their continuous support and encouragement. Also to thank every team I have the pleasure and privilege to work daily with like ZF, Zingo, ECC, FPF, RedDev, ChainSafe, Shielded Labs, QEDIT, ZecHub, Zcash Español, Zcash Brasil and I hope the list continues to grow!
I have presented a grant extension for the next 12 months starting in September 2025.
For this, following procedures from FPF I have edited my current grant. I updated its scope and extended the number of milestones.
You can read the hole grant proposal here
Again, thank you for the trust and support, I hope I can continue to be honored with the role Zcash DevRel Engineer.
Below you can find the details of the extension of this grant for the 12 months (continuing from September 2025)
Description of Problem or Opportunity:
What problem or opportunity will your project address or solve? Provide context for the problem or opportunity and clearly present how your project will add value to the Zcash ecosystem.
Zcash is one of the most reputable projects of the crypto space, not only has the most advanced Zero-Knowledge Cryptography, furthermore it spawned a novel concept in the crypto space (not without controversy): a Dev Fund to provide self-sustainability to the project and committee that its community elects to distribute a portion of this fund in the form of grants. This fund allowed several teams to grow and orbit the Zcash ecosystem delivering a lot of value in different grants such as ZecWallet, Nighthawk Wallet, ZecPages, Z-Go, Free2Z, Global Ambassadors Program, Zcash Media, Z-Faucet, Ziggurat, Zcash Block explorer, Lightwalletd.com, Y-wallet, Zingo!, Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead, Zaino and many others.
Although the mentioned above are successful cases, there is room for improvement in terms of Developer Experience and general direction of the developments and cooperation between grant recipients.
Scarce re-usability of grant-funded developments
The different grants that ZF and ZCG have given out regarding wallets or tooling produce good outcomes, but often they don’t end up being beneficial to the whole developer and user community in terms of providing building bricks for other developments. Teams usually don’t have either the motivation and resources to prioritize generalizing their developments. Tooling for the wide Zcash Dev ecosystem comes out of exceptional efforts from ZF and ECC where it should be the norm that all grants allocate a portion of their work for the benefit of the wide ecosystem.
Opportunity: Improve cohesion and collaboration between the different Zcash Teams to grow our ecosystem
We are all technologists here. We love nerding out, getting into the weeds, exploring rabbit holes just for the sake of it. That’s fine, but users shouldn’t have to download 3 wallets to know what works. This is also a risk because loading the same seed backup in different wallets is not a safe practice.
One thing I’ve learned from all of these years of “coding the last mile” is that one has to live with this hard truth: Users don’t care how things work under the hood. If they have to, then you are probably in trouble. Thanks sustained work from Zcash wallet developers Zcash’s UX has improved significantly. But friction is not only a problem at the user level. Zcash needs to grow its developer community in order to achieve its mission. It is also the case that Zcash developers should have their basics covered, so that they can focus on what their users need and we all should work to create a development stack that keeps hitting the ATH in collaboration and keeps expanding the number of teams that are involved with Zcash development by improving our tech stack.
Proposed Solution: Describe the solution at a high level.
Please be specific about who the users and stakeholders are and how they would interact with your solution. E.g. retail ZEC holders, Zcash core devs, wallet devs, DeFi users, potential Zcash community participants
The section above describes the overall picture that led me to write this grant proposal. Although it does not cover them all. Resolving these issues would require more than a single person. Hence, I propose an initial step towards addressing these points that is more suited to the current market conditions, that is more focused on delivering specific and tangible value quickly to the developer community.
I propose to continue in the role of a Zcash Developer Relations Engineer that can work to fill in the gaps on the different teams and their articulation within the Zcash ecosystem. This would be a full-time role split between different tasks that support the Zcash development teams and the community.
Zcash Developer Relations Engineer 2025-2026
- Zcashd Deprecation Efforts (Development of the Z3 Stack)
- Ecosystem Outreach:
- Contact and build relationships with relevant actors of the Zcash ecosystem towards their migration from Zcashd to the new Zcash Z3 stack.
- Development:
- Contribute with development tasks that can be suitable to a part-time dedication given the role has many hats.
- Liaison between developers and community
- Coordinate Zcash deprecation calls and follow up tasks and items
- Inform the community and different actors of the ecosystem of the progress of this endeavor
- Ecosystem Outreach:
- Development and Testing
- Part-time development for the different Zcash teams
- Provide Code Reviews where my expertise appl
- Developing general-purpose wallet integration testing tooling
- Other Ecosystem Outreach
- Moderate, expand and steer Light Client Working Group
- Attend Arborist Calls and the Zcash Ecosystem Spaces
- Office Hours of Technical support to Dev Teams requesting Grants or proposing RFPs
- Respond to ad hoc ecosystem needs such as exchanges needing API endpoints, listings, etc.
- Attend conferences and other events that are relevant to the role (funding will be evaluated independently with ZGC and ZF with different grants if more funds needed)
- Collaborate with ECC and Shielded Labs on Crosslink integration
- Collaboration with ZCG
- Guiding Grant applicants through the grant application process, helping them connect with different actors of the ecosystem the project they are applying a grant for might rely or depend on.
- Consulting sessions with ZGC on RFP or grant proposals
- RFP drafting and assessment
- Reviewing Grantee’s work
- Developer Relations
- be a point of contact for existing and new actors of the ecosystem
- help teams connect and develop synergy and positive feedback loops that advance the Zcash ecosystem
- participate in events that are of strategic relevance for Zcash and the financial privacy space
- keep track of the short comings of our tooling and contribute with the different development teams to keep makin Zcash more accessible to new comers and more productive for the existing developers.
Solution Format: What is the exact form of the final deliverable you’re creating?
E.g. code shipped within the zcashd and zebra code bases, a website, a feature within a wallet, a text/markdown file, user manuals, etc.
Similarly to the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead, the deliverables will be established on a monthly basis, agreed between the involved teams and ZCG, then informed to the whole community.
There are many projects and initiatives in flight in our ecosystem. Many of them depend on one or more teams. I have made an effort to attempt to forecast for that I have contacted many actors within the Zcash ecosystem like ZCG, ZF, ECC, Zingo Labs, Shielded Labs and Red Dev to have a rough estimate on things that I could continue to contribute to if I remained within this role.
A 10.000 ft view of what’s coming for Zcash in the next 12 months: (not specifically in order)
- NU 6.1
- Zcashd retirement
- Development, alpha, beta and Launch of the new Zcash Z3 stack
- NU7 integration to the Z3 stack
- support of ZSAs across the stack from Nodes to wallets and Block Explorers
- Continue to integrate Zcash In the browser experience
- Support Crosslink integration and outreach
- Integration to DeFI through DEXs and Bridges
- Keep improving and expanding support of Shielded ZEC on hardware wallets
- Ecosystem Response that derive from all of the above
Technical Approach: Dive into the how of your project.
My methodology has been similar to a Staff member of the teams I contribute to, where they would hand me well scoped tasks over their GitHub repositories or other public means that the Zcash community or anyone can oversee. I’ve also been interacting more over community channels like the forums and R&D discord to communicate with other teams as needed.
Work dynamic will be agreed with the ZCG committee on a quarterly basis in terms of direction and priorities and monthly in terms of specific task to complete. All activities will be publicly informed to the community through the Zcash forums in a montly basis following the requirements of the Zcash Community Grants rules.
This project will contain a mix of daily ongoing tasks that are fruit of collaborating with other teams and small contributions that depend solely on the DevRel Role.
Example:
- Ecosystem responses that are either time-sensitive with tight deadlines like the “avoid delisting initiative”
- Ongoing initiatives that have high-impact on the wallet ecosystem and would require collaboration and support from ZWCD but they mainly depend mainly on other teams:
- Zcash Z3
- FROST
- ZSAs
- PoS
- HW wallet support
- Bridges w/ other Coins (ZAVAX bridge)
- NU6.1
- Initiatives that solely depend on Zcash DevRel:
- Tooling development
- Library and SDK development and maintenance
- Community Activities
- LCWG and Office Hours
This reflects how ZCG and myself agreed on managing emerging blockers and priority changes that naturally happen in decentralized and distributed software engineering projects like Zcash. Managing a pool of possible tasks avoids being in a “deadlock” that would make the grant progress to be stalled by dependencies in other projects.
Dependencies: What external entities is your project dependent on? What involvement is required from ZF, ECC, and/or other external organizations? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?
The nature of the work done should not need any further integrations beyond having my PRs accepted by the organizations I’m helping. It wouldn’t require involvement from ECC or ZF besides their regular business as usual community outreach.
Execution risks: What obstacles do you expect? What is most likely to go wrong? Which unknown factors could jeopardize success? Who would have to incorporate your work in order for it to be usable?
Risk: One risk could be that the workload is too much for a single person and that I’m spread too thin to be effective.
Mitigation: During this (hopefully if the community wants so) first half of the grant, it has been the case that some milestones were too varied and I noticed I suffered a lot from context switching. I’ve come to manage it, but for this following chapter I will try to be more dedicated to a main objective within one (or more) milestone, and a secondary one. This will not only help me be more effective but also be more present with the teams I’m committing to work with.
Risk: The opposite would be that teams can’t organize to delegate manageable pieces of work that I can deliver without causing them more overhead than the off-load that would mean that I could take on those tasks for them. Adding people to teams does mean that they have to dedicate some time to accommodate the new team members so they can be productive and on par with the rest of the team.
Mitigation: A way to help avoid this risk would be to create such onboarding processes as part of my work so they can use those processes for augmenting their teams and onboarding new team members or receiving open source contributions from independent developers. An example of this could be how Zingo Viridians and I worked together in shaping up darksidewalletd integration tests. The datasets and tests I worked on were documented in a way that they would be helpful for the team to keep working on them as if one of the Viridians had worked on that and not some external person. Also being my work for “general purpose” it included documentation and examples that internal development wouldn’t invest on.
Risk: Teams depended on are “off schedule” -that being late or early- in terms of the milestone forecast
Mitigation: This has happened in the past part of the grant. And ZCG and I could resolve this by anticipating work of future milestones or bringing in other work that was not originally included in the grant but that it was found to be of importance for the ecosystem. I have also worked with teams to define, scope and delimit the work I’ll be performing with them, and will continue to do so, to be fair to all teams I’m collaborating with. As it was done previously when needed, any deviations from the estimations that might affect my milestones, will be brought up to ZCG for advice.
Unintended Consequences: What are the negative ramifications if your project is successful? Consider usability, stability, privacy, integrity, availability, decentralization, interoperability, maintainability, technical debt, requisite education, etc
An unintended consequence could be that the role becomes a single point of failure or a centralization point. The focus of this role should be supporting and empowering teams to align their particular developments with the interest of the general Zcash developer community and grow this role into a team of people that can outlive the interest of a single person.
Evaluation plan: What metrics for success will you share with the community once you’re done? In addition to quantitative metrics, what qualitative metrics will you commit to report?
It would be a mix between completed pull requests and feedback from the development teams that require my services as community developer. Quoting the Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead grant proposal, Zcash community project developers should be asked how useful my outreach and support has been, and they should rate me as helpful, polite, and be willing to recommend working with me to other Zcash projects.
Compensation total budget / total proposed USD value of grant:
Total Request: 240000 USD (120000 2024-2025, 120000 2025-2026)
Please provide justification for the total compensation budget:
I’ve averaged the annualized compensation of a principal software engineer
Total Request: 240000 USD (24 milestones, 120000 correspond to Sep-2024 to Aug-2025 and 120000 to Sep-2025 to Aug-2026)
Startup funding:
Schedule and Milestones: What is your timeline for the project? Include concrete milestones and the major tasks required to complete each milestone:
Do you require startup funding?
No.
Milestones
-
Milestone 1: (September 2024)
- Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
- Publish report of such task being completed
…
-
Milestone 12: (August 2025)
- Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
- Publish report of such task being completed
**Grant Extension **
-
Milestone 13: (September 2025)
- Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
- Publish report of such task being completed
…
-
Milestone 25: (August 2026)
- Document with agreed tasks with ZCG
- Report of such task being completed
The proposal entails providing community support and sustaining a presence within the ecosystem to build up and strengthen the role. Since some activities could consume the whole time allocation they will be time-boxed to estimate their impact in the overall schedule and milestones.
| Time-boxed Activity | time slot (hours/month) |
|---|---|
| Arborist call (two bi-weekly) | 3 |
| Light Client working group (two bi-weekly calls + administrative) | ~6 |
| LCWG Initiatives Lead | ~3 |
| Community Forums (depending on activity) | ~6 |
| R&D Discord (depending on activity) | ~6 |
| Office Hours (per request but in fixed scheduled) | 8 hours |
| Pull Request Reviews | ~6 |
| Maintain Existing Repositories | ~10 |
| total | 15 to 45 hours |
These are subject to change given the long term nature of the grant and the many dependencies.
As it was stated before, the different milestones will vary depending on the teams’ priorities and other teams like ECC, Zingo, Red Dev, Ywallet or ZC Grantees requesting additional support. As it has been done in the previous grant, this situation has been anticipated and ZCG, myself and the different involved teams have worked to make the best use of my full dedication to Zcash development.