Please submit all new requests to zcashgrants.org.
Please complete all existing grants on this site. Contact grants@zfnd.org with questions.
Due to lack of space, please see the full technical proposal at this link
Please note that the total amount for the grant is of $1,187,615, but the previous field did not allow to input a value larger than $1m
At QEDIT we believe that privacy is a universal human right. We also believe cryptography is a powerful tool to provide financial privacy, which promotes the freedom of the individual.
With this proposal, we want to bring DeFi to the Zcash ecosystem, and at the same time enable the use of the best privacy technology within the existing DeFi ecosystem! A couple of months ago we asked, and the community answered: generic shielded assets (ZSAs / UDAs) are the most requested feature at the moment.
To pave the path for private DeFi, we wish to extend the Orchard protocol with these three features:
These features form the basis for a fully fledged native and private DeFi ecosystem on Zcash such as private DEX, AMM and lending (as well as anonymous credentials for identification), which we see as future work. Our goal is to develop these core features with extensibility in mind.
The project is expected to last between 8-10 months of design and development and another two months of review and merger with the main code-base (or as defined by the NU6 deployment roadmap, to be determined).
To build a usable MVP that will enhance adoption of Zcash, since this is the first core development project outside of the ECC and Zcash Foundation, we will work with the community and other stakeholders to test our assumptions, and ensure that our final design includes the user's feedback. The design must prioritize usability, economic and technical considerations. The following is a list of desiderata:
We are QEDIT, the cryptography team that performed the audits for both Sapling and Orchard before they launched into mainnet. We run the ZKProof standardization effort, and we are leading the [zkInterface interoperability standard]() within the DARPA-funded SIEVE program to advance the state-of-the-art of ZKPs. We've built the first enterprise-grade private asset transfer solution, extending the Sapling protocol.
In this proposal we do not aim to provide the exact details of how the features will be designed or implemented. Our goal is to give some intuition of why we believe that this project can be done and to collect feedback and input from the community on these topics.
For each of the outlined components below, there are several aspects to their implementation:
Due to lack of space, please see the full technical proposal at this link