Doing something new is rarely clean. New ideas create friction. Things break. Not everyone gets it immediately. We made people interact with Zcash before asking them to care about Zcash. From pre-launch through the auction, we built Zilk Road to make an otherwise confusing path into ZEC feel intuitive, seamless, and fun. The auction was completely blind. Bidders submitted their maximum. The top 8,000 bids cleared at one price. Losing bids were refunded in full. Winners received everything above the clearing price back. Once the auction settled, $19M+ was promptly returned to bidders. Meanwhile: 42,000 new wallets created across Noir, Zodl, and Vizor. ~$40M in blind auction bids. ~20M routed through @auroraisnear, powered by @NEARProtocol. Record-breaking activity across the Zcash network. Tens of thousands of bids later, people who had never touched ZEC are now inside the ecosystem. New wallets. Shielded ZEC. New communities discovering what Zcash actually does. That is not a distraction from the mission. That IS adoption. Zcash does not need another thousand people tweeting about privacy. It needs millions of people discovering why privacy matters by actually using it. As for royalties: we got that wrong. 5% wasn’t necessary, and it works against what we’re building. The blind auction was a free market: blind bids, no influence from us. Secondary should follow the same principle. No fee in the middle. All royalties collected to date will go toward Zcash builder grants. Royalties are 0% from here. We’re going to keep experimenting. Some things will work. Some won’t. When we get something wrong, we’ll fix it. The goal stays the same: Bring more people into Zcash. Give them a reason to stay. Build culture worth staying for. Build and fund products that advance privacy for everyone. ZILLIONS_