Grant Application: Forg3t Shield for Zcash (keep seed phrases, keys and addresses out of AI chats and public bug reports)

GitHub issue: Grant Application - Forg3t Shield for Zcash · Issue #533 · ZcashCommunityGrants/zcashcommunitygrants · GitHub (the full technical design is in the first comment) Request: 44,000 USD, four milestones, no startup funding, everything MIT The problem. Zcash protects the transaction, but not what people paste or publish about it afterwards. In February a zcashd snapshot published for operators turned out to contain a wallet.dat, and every node restored from it shared one seed phrase ( disclosure ). The same thing happens in text: when a wallet misbehaves, people paste the problem into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, a support chat, Discord, the forum or a GitHub issue, and the paste can carry a txid, a unified address, a full wallet log, a viewing key or a seed phrase. On 2026-11-02 we checked gitleaks and TruffleHog: neither has a rule for Zcash keys, Zcash addresses or BIP 39 seed phrases. What we will build. zcash-secret-scan , a Rust crate that finds Zcash material in text and validates every hit with the real encoding ( zcash_address for ZIP 316, Bech32, Base58Ch