Watch the live recording in Youtube
Community Call Summary: Eclipse MicroGrant Updates, First Cohort of Grantee Presentations, and + Growth
Deep dives into ongoing projects and a glimpse into what’s ahead for the ecosystem. Here are the key takeaways:
Understanding Grants & Their Role in the Penumbra Ecosystem
The conversation emphasized the importance of grants in scaling the Penumbra ecosystem, ensuring long-term engagement rather than one-off contributions. Instead of simply funding isolated projects, Penumbra aims to create a sustained community of developers, contributors, and builders who enrich the network with useful applications. Grants serve as a strategic tool to push forward privacy-enhancing solutions, ecosystem-wide integrations, and innovations that align with Penumbra’s mission.
Several priority areas for the next round of grants were discussed, particularly:
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Developer documentation & example applications: Enhancing ease of entry for new developers.
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Product-specific help materials: Making user guides more accessible and embedded within applications.
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NFT puzzles & community engagement strategies: Leveraging Penumbra’s affinity for cryptographic challenges to craft immersive experiences for users.
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The token factory: more detailed information can be found in this thread.
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Open RFP: A call for any innovative proposals outside pre-listed categories.
Application is open and closes on Friday, 6th of June at 11.59pm UTC
Eclipse Round 1 Grantees Present Their Work & Progress
A key highlight of the call was hearing directly from grantees about their ongoing projects. Each grantee provided insights into what they were building, how their work contributes to Penumbra, and challenges they’ve faced.
ZEC Hub: An Educational Hub for the Shielded Ecosystem
The ZEC Hub team shared their contributions to educating the crypto community about privacy, particularly through bounties that incentivize users to create content for Penumbra.
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Launched bounties and completed several Penumbra-related tasks, including producing visual content and documentation to help onboard new users.
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Cross-community engagement has been strengthened by setting up a channel linking both ZEC Hub and Penumbra’s Discords.
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Upcoming plans include more network stats tracking for Penumbra, with a dashboard addition in progress.
Majita: Tax Reporting for Shielded Transactions
Matija introduced his tax reporting application—a tool designed to help users track taxable events on Penumbra, despite transactions being private.
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The app provides FIFO (First-In-First-Out) inventory tracking, ensuring accurate capital gains reporting.
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IBC handling allows users to distinguish between transfers within their own portfolios versus actual inflows.
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The project will generate detailed reports summarizing trading profits, expenses, and portfolio positions.
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Plans for deployment soon, with community feedback encouraged for further refinement.
Tokidoki: Penumbra 101 Educational Series
Since Tokidoki couldn’t attend live, he provided a video presentation outlining his work on educational articles aimed at introducing crypto users to Penumbra’s privacy features.
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The five-part series covers shielded transactions, DEX functionalities, IBC privacy, tax-efficient staking, and the Prax wallet.
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Each article aims to simplify complex concepts while drawing comparisons to existing DeFi norms, making privacy feel essential and accessible.
Exciting Proposals & Upcoming Developments
The call touched on several governance and network improvement topics, including:
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TIA as a gas token: A proposal to allow Celestia’s TIA token to be used for gas fees on Penumbra, making it easier for users coming from the Celestia ecosystem.
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Liquidity tournament adoption: Discussions around introducing incentive mechanisms to improve liquidity on Penumbra- please contribute your thoughts in the forum!
Developer & Community Engagement: Building Together
As a community-driven project. The team is actively working to make development easier and engage contributors in meaningful ways.
Key Initiatives:
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Developer Documentation & Tools → Improving onboarding for developers by enhancing documentation and creating example applications to showcase Penumbra’s capabilities headed by Gar, Penumbra Labs product lead.
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Live Development Streams → CTO Erwan has been live-streaming coding sessions on X, giving the community a behind-the-scenes look at Penumbra’s progress.
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Community Events & Games → The community team is hosting onboarding games, quizzes, and interactive events to keep penumbra users educated and engaged.
Next Steps for the Community
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The next community call will focus on the liquidity tournament, with deeper discussions on upcoming changes.
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Community members are encouraged to engage in the forum, share thoughts on governance proposals, and explore open grant opportunities before the June 6 deadline. Application is live, register today!
Your feedback truly matters! We would always like to hear your thoughts in #feedback channel on Discord.