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 leave any questions or comments below.