In December, the Zcash Foundation polled the Zcash Community Advisory Panel (ZCAP) to determine which candidates should be elected to the next Zcash Community Grants Committee  We would like to extend a warm welcome to the following candidates who were selected through majority approval voting:

• Aditya (aiyadt on the forums)
• Brian (Wobbzz on the forums)
• Hudson Jameson (Souptacular on the forums)
• Jason McGee (aquietinvestor on the forums)
• Michael Harms (Brunchtime on the forums)

As part of the same ZCAP poll, the Foundation also sought community feedback on a proposal from community member Jason McGee that ZIP 1014 be amended to provide the grants committee with a discretionary budget. The community voted overwhelmingly in support of such an amendment to the ZIP - to provide the committee with a discretionary budget denominated in ZEC. The community-recommended budget was 3% of the Major Grants slice of the Dev Fund (approximately 3,156 ZEC), with a floor of $250,000 and a cap of $1,000,000.

Please note that Zcash Community Grants is a recent rebrand of what was known as the Zcash Open Major Grants (ZOMG). More information on the reasons for the rebrand, as expressed by the new committee, can be found here.

One of the new Zcash Community Grants Committee’s first tasks was to evaluate a proposal from QEDIT that seeks to build User-Defined Assets (also known as Zcash Shielded Assets or ZSAs) on the Zcash blockchain. Within a week of being elected, the new grants committee decided to approve the QEDIT grant - with the conditional requirement that the team posts monthly updates throughout the lifecycle of the grant. The approval of this grant marks the largest grant in major grants' history to be approved within the Zcash ecosystem, totalling $1,187,615. 

You can find the QEDIT proposal here.

The Zcash Foundation would like to thank the outgoing ZOMG Committee for their service to the Zcash Community. The previous committee lived up to the trust and expectation placed in them by the Zcash community by doing a spectacular job. Meeting every two weeks, they assessed 72 grant applications, and accepted 28 of them, ranging from a $4,800 grant for building a cold wallet utility, to a $673,200 grant to the Tor Project to build a Rust implementation of the Tor client protocols, which will make it easier to integrate Tor with Zcash.

Executive Director - Jack Gavigan - thanks the outgoing committee.

Zcon is an annual event organized by the Zcash Foundation. Each year, the event provides an international platform for academics, researchers, engineers, industrial participants, enthusiaists and budding students around the world to share their take on privacy-preserving technologies. The next Zcon event, Zcon3, is slated to happen in June 2022. Zcon is not possible without diverse speakers from the privacy and Zcash communities. 

If you are interested in speaking/presenting/leading a workshop at Zcon3, virtually, in-person, or either, please fill out this RFP form. The deadline to submit is February 14, 2022.