ZGo Migration to Zebra - Grant Application

Community Grants Applications
3

Hi @pitmutt, thanks a lot for putting this together and for continuing to maintain ZGo and Zenith over the years.

Right now, most new ZEC payment flows for merchants are naturally gravitating toward the BTCPay Server plugin, for pretty simple reasons: it’s easier to plug Zcash into an existing payment stack than to convince merchants to learn and self-host a separate point-of-sale system. We also ran into this when talked with Nym devs about “the best way to accept ZEC as a payment method”, you know.

From the committee’s perspective, ZGo is currently the only real alternative to the BTCPay plugin in the “Zcash-native payment processor” category, and migrating it from zcashd to Zebra via Zenith looks like a logical and necessary step.

To help us evaluate the grant properly, it would be helpful if you could clarify a few higher-level questions. We don’t want to simply “keep ZGo alive”; we want to understand where it can grow and how this work fits into a sustainable future of Zcash ecosystem.

  1. Product direction
    Right now ZGo feels like a strong idea with low visibility. How do you see its role going forward, especially alongside the BTCPay Server or Binance payments, for example, as popular CEX solution? What is ZGo uniquely good at, or what could it become uniquely good at, that would make it worth investing in beyond this migration?

  2. Practical adoption
    What would be the most effective steps (from your perspective) to make ZGo easier to adopt in real life? Examples might include “one-click” deployment, simpler UX for merchants, demo shops, integration guides, @ZecHub partnership, etc. We’re not asking for a marketing campaign, just an idea of how ZGo can realistically reach more users. What kind of help would you like to receive from our Community structures?

  3. Scope and maintenance
    How much future maintenance do you expect after NU7? We’re trying to understand the long-term cost of keeping ZGo running.

  4. Milestones and cost split
    You mention that work on the Zebra migration started in the spring, and you’re targeting a release by the end of December. Could you clearly separate which parts of this grant are retroactive (already completed work) and which parts are forward-looking? Would you be willing to restructure the grant into two milestones, with separate deliverables and amounts for each?

Please everyone who has ideas speak out. Thank you!

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