Today Zec.rocks is announcing ongoing ZEC rewards for ALL operators of Zcash light wallet servers. Our goal is to send upwards of $100/month worth of ZEC to anyone running reliable light wallet servers, determined by the rules below.
Rewards will be sent to the donation address announced by each server, a new Zcash feature!
We currently have a budget of 550 ZEC to pull this off which was generously contributed by a community member earlier this year. (Thank you!!) We will disburse it as defined below over the next six months. This is an experiment which we may continue further if it goes well.
Operator Reward Guidelines:
- Launch your nodes now! On September 15, 2025 a one-time payout of $150 in ZEC will be sent to all Zcash light wallet servers that are broadcasting a valid Zcash Orchard donation address, to kick this off! Let us know if you are operating a server by responding in this thread with its details.
- On the 15th of each month, the top 25 Zcash servers with the best uptime will receive 1/25 of our monthly reward budget, intended to be ~$100 worth of Zcash. It might be more or less depending on price action. The budget will consist of the initial 550 ZEC minus our one-time payout defined above, divided by six for the six months that we intend to distribute rewards. The first of these monthly payouts will be in October 2025.
- We will determine which 25 servers have the best uptime over a 30 day period by using the metrics collected by Hosh. All participants’ servers will be added to Hosh in a “Community Nodes” section.
- All ZEC rewards will be sent to the donation addresses broadcasted by each light wallet server respectively. Add “–donation-address” to lightwalletd to broadcast an address.
- We are providing personal assistance to anyone needing help running a Zcash node in our Workshops Forum, come hang out and don’t hesitate to let us know if you have questions!
- All payments will be made in ZEC using the Orchard shielded pool. All participants must broadcast a valid Zcash UA containing an Orchard receiver on their servers to qualify.
- These rewards are for all Zcash light wallet servers running the latest versions of Zebra, Zcashd, Lightwalletd, and/or Zaino as defined by their official “latest” releases on their container registries. Container use is not required, but that is how we define the latest version.
- One reward per participant per month will be distributed, at our discretion. We expect you to be honest about this to maximize participants. Subdomains don’t multiply eligibility (*.example.com counts as one participant) to be fair.
- We reserve the right to refuse the distribution of ZEC to any entity for any reason at our sole discretion. We intend to use this right only as a means of dissuading bad faith participants from farming this reward system. The reward is intended to help decentralize the currency rather than attract bots/farmers. We reserve our right to refuse payment to any Zcash server broadcasting an address, for any reason.
- There will be no retroactive payments if we were unaware that you were operating a Zcash server. All servers must be listed on Hosh. We commit to adding servers in a timely fashion once we become aware of them. To make us aware you must respond to this thread with your light wallet server’s hostname and port.
- Important privacy note: We will publish the view key (UFVK) of the wallet we are using to make payouts here on September 16th, 2025. Note that all TXIDs and recipient addresses of our payout transactions should be presumed to be publicly-disclosed. We are doing this to be transparent.
- Zec.rocks will not claim any of the rewards. If you would like to also abstain to help us allocate our budget to new server operators, state such in the thread below.
- This is an experimental pilot program. Payments will cease after March 16th, 2026 unless otherwise announced by myself.
Why reward Zcash server operators?
Zcash has a big problem today: only three entities are hosting mainnet light wallet servers, an incredible centralization risk for the currency.
When you open any Zcash light wallet (all mobile apps), you are connecting to Zec.rocks, Ywallet, or eZcash’s servers. (currently operated by myself, @hanh , and @aarnott respectively)
What’s the risk? In the Monero community IPs have been logged by light wallet operators, enabling unethical surveillance by powerful entities. Zec.rocks maintains a strong stance against logging IP addresses, but the more server operators we have in our community, the safer our users will be.
Monero has 1,991 nodes supporting light wallet connections today. Zcash has 13. We can do better!
In the past we announced ZEC rewards for participants of our Zcash server workshop that launched reliable servers. That didn’t sit right with us. We decided to change our approach to reward all Zcash light wallet server operators whether they have attended our class our not, based on the guidelines above.
Zcash needs your help: Learn to run a Zcash server.
Help us decentralize Zcash by hosting a server, it’s not too hard! We are hosting a workshop on how to host your own light wallet server in our Workshops Forum.