The Zcash Foundation is committed to being transparent with the Zcash community and our other stakeholders. Today, we are releasing our quarterly report for the fourth quarter of 2021. As with our previous quarterly reports, this report describes our financial inflow and outflows, with a detailed breakdown of our expenses, and a snapshot of the Foundation’s financial position, in terms of liquid assets and liabilities that must be met using those assets. This report also provides our regular overview of the Zcash Foundation engineering team’s activities, and gives an overview of some of the ot ..read more

The Zcash Foundation is pleased to welcome Fungai Matambanadzo as its Engineering Project Manager, while our current Engineering Manager is away on sabbatical. Fungai has over 10 years’ experience working with different-sized companies in different domains within the tech industry - his most recent area of focus being scrum/project management. Fungai was drawn to the Engineering Project Manager position at the Zcash Foundation due to his enthusiasm and passion for blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole, which he believes will be adopted by mainstream society in the ne ..read more

The election of a new Major Grants Review Committee means that the sun sets on the inaugural Committee’s tenure. Chris Burniske, Holmes Wilson, Hudson Jameson, Sarah Jamie Lewis, and Shawn (aka MineZcash) were elected by the Zcash Community Advisory Panel in September 2020, and they decided to adopt the name Zcash Open Major Grants (ZOMG). The Major Grants slice of the Dev Fund began accruing ZEC when NU4 activated two months later, and the first grant applications were submitted in early 2021. Following Sarah Jamie Lewis’s decision to step down from the Committee, ML stepped in to fill the em ..read more

On December 20th, the Zcash Foundation polled the Zcash Community Advisory Panel (ZCAP) to determine which candidates should be elected to the next Major Grants Review Committee, more commonly known as the Zcash Open Major Grants Committee (ZOMG). We also sought feedback on a proposal from community member and ZOMG candidate Jason McGee that ZIP 1014 be amended to provide ZOMG with a discretionary budget. Polling closed at 9am UTC on January 1st, and the results were released shortly thereafter. Results of the ZOMG Election The ZOMG election was decided by approval voting, with the five candid ..read more

After the success of Zcon2 Lite, our first fully-virtual conference, we are happy to announce that Zcon3 will be held in late June 2022 and will be virtual, with the possibility of an in-person component. We recognize that there is great benefit to connecting with others in person and we hope to be able to bring everyone together in Toronto, Canada. However, safety is our top priority and we will provide an update in spring 2022 regarding our ability to host attendees in person. Zcon is not possible without diverse speakers from the privacy and Zcash communities. If you are interested in spea ..read more

Today, the Zcash Foundation (ZF) will begin polling the Zcash Community Advisory Panel (ZCAP) on two questions: which candidates should be elected to the next ZOMG Committee, and whether ZIP 1014 should be amended to provide the ZOMG Committee with a discretionary budget. The poll will close at 09:00 UTC on 1st January 2022. Elections to the ZOMG Committee The largest slice of the Zcash Dev Fund (40%) is earmarked for major grants “to fund independent teams entering the Zcash ecosystem, to perform major ongoing development work (or other word) for the public good of the Zcash ecosystem”. While ..read more

The Zcash Foundation is happy to welcome Gustavo Valverde, who will be taking on a newly-created role at ZF as a DevOps Engineer. Gustavo has over ten years in information technology with experience in various fields, including information security, internal audit, business continuity, cloud architecture, DevOps, and product management. He has developed business continuity and disaster recovery plans development for financial institutions, built a DevOps culture at several startups, developed automated CI/CD workflows on complex teams, and supported critical infrastructures for SaaS solutions ..read more

Last week, we announced the revised schedule for ZOMG elections. The ZOMG Committee is elected by the Zcash Community Advisory Panel (ZCAP), a panel of community members established by the Zcash Foundation (ZF) as a means of soliciting advisory input from the Zcash community. The ZCAP was originally formed in 2018 as a community governance panel. It was expanded in 2019, 2020, and most recently in June 2021. During that time, ZF has solicited ZCAP’s advisory input on the appointment of the Zcash Foundation board of directors, and on questions ranging from whether Zcash should move to an ASIC-r ..read more

In late September, we paused the ZOMG election process to address questions that had arisen regarding potential conflict of interest issues. These questions arose when it became clear that some of the candidates standing for election were past, current or prospective grant applicants. As a result, we were forced to consider the conflict of interest issues that would arise from ZOMG Committee members applying for new grants (or continuing to receive milestone payouts for previously-approved grants), and how best to mitigate attendant concerns about private inurement and excess benefit. Clarity ..read more

The Zcash Foundation is committed to being transparent with the Zcash community and our other stakeholders. Today, we are releasing our quarterly report for the third quarter of 2021. As with our previous quarterly reports, this report describes our financial inflow and outflows, with a detailed breakdown of our expenses, and we have included a snapshot of the Foundation’s financial position, in terms of liquid assets and liabilities that must be met using those assets. This report also provides our regular overview of the Zcash Foundation engineering team’s activities, introduces two new memb ..read more