[ZcF-general] Zcash Foundation Update — October, 2018

[Sonya Mann]

Happy November, friends! In chronological order, here's how the Zcash
Foundation spent its time during October 🎃🦓🎃🦓🎃🦓🎃

We contributing to sponsoring Crypto Springs, a conference in Southern
California. Executive Director Josh Cincinnatti attended.

We held a successful meetup during SF Blockchain Week. The presentations
were not recorded, but here's a snapshot of Alejandro Machado as he
described his research on Zcash usage in Venezuela:
https://twitter.com/ZcashFoundation/status/1050224386060382208

We published a blog post with updates from the previous round of grant
winners, and included a brief note on the delay in announcing the next
round: https://z.cash.foundation/blog/update-on-grants/

That brief note is important enough to excerpt here:

> You may be wondering what on earth is going on with our Grants Program.
We know that this answer is unsatisfying, but we’re dealing with internal
delays and figuring out how to address the process deficiencies for future
programs.

> Our plan for Q4 and beyond is to switch to a more lightweight, nimble
funding option. The Grants Program has produced excellent work, but the
Foundation wants to accelerate that progress and improve our ability to
support the Zcash ecosystem.

Later in the month, we hosted a Sapling celebration livestream that
featured Q&A with Zcash Company engineers and other staff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtIYLqHfbSk

Here's the most exciting item on the list! We announced a technical
partnership with Parity Technologies to build an independent Zcash node
implementation. Many more details in our press release:
https://z.cash.foundation/blog/parity-partnership/

Parity's blog post:
https://medium.com/paritytech/parity-teams-up-with-zcash-foundation-for-parity-zcash-client-cca8a47e18f3

CoinDesk coverage: https://www.coindesk.com/parity-zcash-crypto/

At the very end of the month, Executive Director Josh Cincinnati spoke at
Devcon4, as did Ian Miers, who is on the Zcash Foundation Board. We're
developing blog posts based on both talks.

You can watch a recorded livestream of Josh's talk at this link, just
navigate to the 5:43:00 timestamp:
https://slideslive.com/38911452/devcon4-day2

The timestamp of Ian's talk has yet to be unearthed, but you can watch a
previous version that he presented at Scaling Bitcoin. Timestamped link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtF7psIKWg&feature=youtu.be&t=3685

Throughout the month, behind the scenes, we continued conversations about
revamping the Grants Program and coordinating with the Zcash Company on
standards and development work. We also continued evaluating several
potential partnerships that are still too early or tentative to share in
public.

Phew, that's everything! We hope that you all had a happy Sapling
activation and a happy Halloween! As always, feel free to respond to this
email with any questions or comments.

Sonya Mann
Communications Manager
Zcash Foundation
@sonyaellenmann <https://twitter.com/sonyaellenmann>