GrantProposals-2018Q2

There's a pretty detailed proposal of a privacy-preserving L2 solution for Zcash, called BOLT (https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels/). The original paper is at https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701 , and there's a prototype implementation by J. Ayo Akinyele at https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/libbolt . Further development of that implementation is being funded by the Zcash Foundation (https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/iss...). The Blossom upgrade scheduled for October 2019 is intended to include consensus changes needed for BOLT (https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/announcing-zcash-blossom-... and https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3676). There are also realistic longer-term possibilities for L1 scaling of Zcash, including the possibility of doing a Coda-like succinct blockchain (https://codaprotocol.com

tl;dr the Zcash Foundation (my employer) wants to fund people with cool ideas that loosely fit into the blockchain x privacy space. For those of you in academia: Discretionary funds! The deadline for proposals is May 18. Announcement blog post: https://z.cash.foundation//blog/q2-grant-program/ Here's the call for proposals directly: https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2 Ideas go here: https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2018Q2/issues (you can also see what others have proposed so far!) The last time we ran this grant program, there were 27 applicants. You can see their proposals and the discussion about them here: https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/GrantProposals-2017Q4/issues 10 grants were awarded. The specific amounts were based on scope — it varied from $4,500 to $30,000. More details here: https://z.c