ZShieldHer — a Zcash education site for domestic violence survivors (built, live, seeking feedback + ZCG interest)

General
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Hey everyone,

Some of you know me from my ZecHub contributions — I’ve been working on things like the AI chatbot integration, the blockchain explorers page redesign, and the hackathon event pages over the past months.

One thing kept nagging at me while I was working on the blockchain explorers page: I was making it easier to look up any transaction, any address, any balance — all in real time, for free, with no permission required. And I started thinking about the flip side. Who is this bad for?

That question led me somewhere I didn’t expect.

The problem

Financial abuse occurs in an estimated 99% of domestic violence cases. Controlling a partner’s money — monitoring transactions, limiting access, demanding receipts — is one of the primary tools of coercive control, and it’s the #1 reason survivors say they can’t leave. Not fear. Not love. Money.

Here’s where it gets directly relevant to us:

Bitcoin doesn’t help these people. Bitcoin makes things worse.

A transparent blockchain is a permanent public record. If an abuser knows or discovers a survivor’s wallet address — through phone access, coercion, or just bad OpSec — they can watch every incoming and outgoing transaction in real time, forever, on any blockchain explorer. No password. No court order. No permission.

Zcash shielded transactions remove this attack surface completely. Not “harder to trace.” Mathematically impossible to observe without the recipient’s viewing key.

I kept looking for anyone building education materials specifically around this use case. I couldn’t find anything. So I built it.

What ZShieldHer is

A free, open-source education site for three audiences:

Survivors — a 7-module self-guided course: why your bank account isn’t safe → why most crypto is worse → what Zcash does differently → wallet setup → receiving money privately → spending safely → building a 6-month exit fund. No crypto knowledge assumed. Written for someone who has never heard of a blockchain.

Advocates and shelter workers — a complete 30-minute workshop facilitator guide with a full script, step-by-step live demo, FAQ for the hardest client questions (“Is this legal?” / “What if he finds my phone?”), and a section on setting up a shelter’s own ZEC donation wallet to distribute emergency funds directly to clients.

Donors and supporters — a step-by-step guide for sending private emergency funds, including why routing through your own shielded wallet matters before sending (direct exchange withdrawals use transparent addresses and create a visible record).

Technical approach:

  • Astro + Tailwind CSS, static output

  • Offline-first with service worker — works without internet after first visit

  • Pagefind for offline full-text search

  • noindex, nofollow + no-referrer — doesn’t appear in search results, doesn’t leak referrer

  • Emergency exit button on every page (Alt+X) that replaces browser history and redirects to a neutral site

  • No accounts, no analytics, no cookies, no external scripts — everything self-hosted

  • Accepts ZEC donations at a shielded Unified Address
    Live at: zshieldher.com
    Source: Github

Why this matters for Zcash adoption

Every conversation about Zcash adoption comes back to the same question: why would someone choose ZEC over BTC or ETH in a situation where either would work?

For most people, the answer is still abstract. Privacy is good in principle. Surveillance is bad in principle. But it doesn’t feel urgent.

For a survivor hiding $40/week from a partner who monitors their bank accounts and phone, the answer is not abstract. Shielded ZEC is the only tool that actually solves the problem. Cash has physical risk. Bank accounts are visible. Bitcoin is permanently public. Shielded Zcash is the one option that doesn’t create a new attack surface.

This is a concrete, documented, real-world case where Zcash’s specific privacy properties directly protect human safety. I think that’s worth investing in as an ecosystem.

What I’m looking for from this community

Technical review — I’ve tried to be precise about what shielded transactions do and don’t protect against. If anything is overstated or technically wrong, I want to fix it now.

Wallet recommendation — I went with Zodl for its clean onboarding and shielded-by-default behavior. Open to discussion if there’s a better current recommendation for non-technical users.

ZCG interest — I’m planning to submit a formal ZCG application to fund:

  • Translations (Spanish, Arabic, and Swahili as first priorities based on global DV statistics)

  • Outreach to DV shelter networks to get the workshop guide into actual use

  • Long-term hosting and maintenance

Before I write the full application, I want to know if the community sees this as in scope. I believe it is — it’s a real use case, it’s built and working, and it has a clear path to impact — but I’d rather have that conversation here first.

Connections in the DV/shelter space — if anyone in this community has relationships with domestic violence organizations, legal aid groups, or women’s shelters that might want to pilot the workshop guide, I’d really like to talk.

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to the feedback.

— higherlander

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It’s an awesome project, thanks for building and sharing… The whole website looks very good and the tech stack is solid, well done!

I suggest you to register and use a zcash.me profile and take also a look to zcashnames.

I hope you can have a chance with zcg funding, however I’m sure that you can receive some funds from private donations, this topic is very important.

Best!

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I’ve setup zcash.me profile.

Thank you @jenkin

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Excited to share that ZShieldHer has now been listed on the ZecHub Wiki Community Projects page :tada:

Huge thanks to the amazing ZecHub community for supporting builders and highlighting projects across the Zcash ecosystem.

Being included alongside other community-driven initiatives is a meaningful milestone for ZShieldHer as we continue building for privacy, education, and inclusion in Web3.

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We received our first anonymous ZEC donation — from someone who didn’t need a receipt, didn’t need credit, and trusted the work enough to give privately. That’s the whole thesis of ZShieldHer in one transaction.

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Once you receive a donation, does it go to the victim’s zcash wallet (ZEC) or get converted to cash?

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Great question, hanh.

ZShieldHer is an education site, not a fund custodian. There are three separate flows, and it’s worth being clear about each:

1. Survivor’s own wallet (primary model) The site teaches survivors to set up their own Zodl wallet and share their personal shielded address with a trusted friend, family member, or advocate. The ZEC goes directly to the survivor’s wallet, ZShieldHer never touches it. Module 5 covers exactly how to receive safely. Module 6 covers converting ZEC to cash when ready: cryptocurrency ATMs that dispense cash, or asking a trusted person to receive ZEC and hand over cash in person.

2. Shelter wallet (organizational model) Advocates page includes a guide for DV shelters to set up their own shielded ZEC donation wallet. The shelter receives ZEC from donors, then distributes amounts directly to individual survivors’ wallets. This is useful for organizations that want to pool donations and disburse emergency funds to clients, it also means the shelter, not the survivor, handles the crypto-to-cash conversion if needed.

3. ZShieldHer project donations The UA on the /donors/ page goes to the project itself (hosting, development, translations). This is what the anonymous 0.1 ZEC went to, not to a survivor.

So to directly answer your question: in the primary model, ZEC lands in the survivor’s own Zodl wallet and stays as ZEC until she is ready to convert it to cash, on her timeline, privately, without the conversion being traceable back to the original shielded receipt.

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How can she convert to cash privately when her bank accounts are monitored ?

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A new idea, born from @hanh’s question

When @hanh asked “does the donation go to the survivor’s wallet or get converted to cash?” — I started thinking about the gap between those two steps. The ZEC arrives privately. But at some point, she still has to buy something. And that purchase leaves a trace.

What if it didn’t have to?

The idea is a ZEC-powered proxy purchasing network

A survivor needs something — a bus ticket, a prepaid phone, clothes for a job interview. She can’t buy it herself. Her card statements are monitored. Her order history is watched.

She finds a verified volunteer (a Shield) in her region. She sends ZEC to the Shield’s shielded address. In the memo field — encrypted, readable only by the Shield — she includes the item and a safe delivery address (a shelter, a PO box, a trusted friend).

The Shield reads the memo, buys the item with their own card or cash, and ships it to the address.

The survivor receives the item. Her bank account shows nothing. Her card history shows nothing. The ZEC transaction is shielded and invisible. The only record of the purchase exists in the Shield’s name.

Why the Zcash memo field is the key

This idea only works cleanly because of shielded memos. 512 bytes, end-to-end encrypted, readable only by the recipient. The delivery address never touches a server. It travels inside the transaction itself — atomic with the payment.

No account. No database entry. No server storing a survivor’s location. Just an encrypted instruction bundled with private ZEC.

I thought about this for about ten minutes before realising I was describing something that only Zcash can do cleanly.

Trust: a DAO-verified Shield registry

The hardest problem in this system is trust. A “volunteer” who is actually an abuser fishing for survivor locations would be catastrophic.

The proposal: a DAO-governed Shield registry. New volunteers apply, existing Shields and partner DV organizations vote to approve or reject. Approved Shields receive an on-chain credential and their UA address is listed publicly (region only — no PII). Their reputation is visible through their on-chain transaction history.

A simpler v1 might be a multisig approval from a small set of founding DV organizations. The DAO layer can be built progressively as the network grows.

This is an idea, not a product

I’m sharing this now because the forum is where these things should start — and because @hanh’s question deserves credit for prompting it. This is rough. There are unsolved problems (dispute resolution, overpayment handling, the reply channel back to the survivor). I don’t know yet whether this belongs inside ZShieldHer or as a separate proposal.

What I do know: the Zcash memo field + shielded transactions make this uniquely possible in a way that no other payment layer does. That feels worth sharing.

Thoughts welcome — especially from anyone with experience in DV mutual aid networks or DAO governance.

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@hanh, that’s the hard problem. And honestly, your question just sharpened something I’ve been thinking about.

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Through this conversation, I kept coming back to the same friction point: a survivor receives ZEC, but to use it she needs to install an app, set up a wallet, manage a seed phrase — steps that require time, a safe device, and technical confidence she may not have.

What if she didn’t need any of that?

The idea is “paste your seed, use your wallet, close the tab”

She pastes her 24-word seed phrase
Her Unified Address appears instantly and she can share it to receive ZEC
She can see her balance and send ZEC directly from the browser
When she closes the tab, everything is gone, no data saved, no trace, no account
No app install. No setup. No localStorage. No server ever sees her seed.

A survivor needs to send ZEC to a Shield’s address with the delivery details in the memo. This wallet makes that possible without installing anything. She opens the page, pastes her seed, fills in the Shield’s UA + item details in the memo field, sends and closes the tab.

The memo travels encrypted inside the transaction. The tab leaves no history.

Curious whether anyone in this thread — particularly those closer to the wallet infrastructure side — sees a clean path to the implementation.

And what if these features were provided by a trusted team like Zechub, Zodl, Zkool?

@jenkin @hanh @gorusys @squirrel @dismad

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I think ideas like this is exactly what the community needs.

You hit the nail on the head, ZEC still has an off-ramp problem. Through my work on Zcash projects, I now believe that getting to the point where people can just use ZEC directly is not a technical problem, it’s a community problem.

We need to build (or onboard) a community of people that do other things than blockchain software development. We need to reach the bakers, florists, coffee shops, etc.

Your project is a great idea to do just that, and I think partnering with an existing organization supporting victims of DV is probably the best approach. I would think that these organizations would be interested on a system where a victim downloads a wallet, receives ZEC from the org in a matter of minutes and can just show up with that ZEC at any of their partners and get what they need. It may mean that ZShieldHer needs a “For Organizations” section, laying out how ZEC could help.

A well-established organization in my area is Tubman.

It did come to mind, a “camouflage” option in a mobile wallet may be of use in this case. A button/gesture that queries some news RSS feed that the user can just doomscroll through if needed.

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Instead of a DAO directly, why not an AI agent? An agent or group of agents could be deployed ( and never stopped ) that have one purpose: Receive and Send transactions per instructions on memo. As AI ramps up, I assume virtual shopping assistants will get better and they will “shop for you”.

I like this idea better because since a DAO is public, and needs to be public for this type of service, it creates friction for DAO members.

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Didn’t think of this angle. You’re right that DAO membership creates exposure. An autonomous agent removes that attack surface entirely. Thinking about this now.
But it doesn’t seem like it would be that easy.
Thank you, @dismad

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@pitmutt this is the ZEC ecosystem problem in one comment.
We built the rails. Now we need the bakers and florists.
I think Tubman is a perfect starting point. I’d be glad to collaborate. Could you bring the org relationships? I bring the education materials. Let’s do this together.

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Using the webzjs-wallet WASM, I built a simple web wallet.
Currently, it supports generating and displaying a new wallet only.

I am researching the approach to broadcast tx.
If someone knows this, please help me.

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Just to clarify, I don’t have any direct connections with this organization. I would be happy to reach out to them though, I’ll DM you and we can collaborate on an initial message.

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CipherScan exposes a public broadcast endpoint:

POST https://api.mainnet.cipherscan.app/api/tx/broadcast
Content-Type: application/json

{ "rawTx": "<hex-encoded-signed-transaction>" }

Hope it can help :saluting_face:

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Thank you @pitmutt

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Thank you @kenbak.
Now I am curious if it’s possible to make signed tx with webzjs wasm.