Grant Application: Zethora - Orchard Integration Audit & ZEC Bridging

Link to the full GitHub Application: Zethora - Orchard Integration Audit & ZEC Bridging · Issue #534 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants · GitHub Zethora - Orchard Integration Audit & ZEC Bridging · Issue #534 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants What is Zethora? We are a live testnet with a custom Rust wallet CLI and a native Windows GUI. We have integrated Zcash Orchard (Halo2) into our codebase, but we have intentionally disabled it on testnet and mainnet, and locked the UI toggle , because we believe privacy without an independent cryptographic audit is dangerous. The Proposal We are requesting $50,000 ($35k for a professional ZK audit, $15k for 6 months of full-time lead dev time). This will fund the independent audit of our zethora-shield crate and allow us to build a native ZEC bridge to our 1-second settlement network. Why We Need the Audit Since submitting our application, we have made massive progress: Shielded Coinbase: We implemented the consensus rules to allow miners to route block rewards into the Orchard shielde