Hi everyone,
I’m Luis Antonio Cruz (@luisantoniocrag) and I want to run for one of the four seats in the September 2026 cohort. I live in Mexico, so I count toward the non-US requirement.
I ran last year and finished tenth. I’d rather say that myself than have someone else bring it up. Last year I mostly wrote about my story. This time I want to be concrete about what I would do with the seat and what you can hold me to.
My history with Horizen
I’ve been around since 2018 and got seriously involved in 2020 as a Zen Evangelist. I wrote tutorials in Spanish and English, took technical bounties, set up nodes and supernodes, and contributed to the Zendoo command documentation. I’ve been Trust Level 4 / Ambassador here for a while now, and I took part in the discussions around ZenIP-42405, 42406 and 42407 while the Base migration was being debated.
What I do for a living
I’m a payments engineer with around seven years building production systems.
The biggest one is Yoshi Cash, a cashless payment platform I designed and rolled out to more than 5,000 POS terminals across five different hardware platforms. It has processed over MX$1 billion (about US$50M) and peaked at around 800 transactions per second during a FIFA World Cup match. I worked at the EMV and terminal cryptography level.
Alongside that I published the Boletomóvil ticketing app and led its migration from UIKit to SwiftUI. Android and Kotlin are my main discipline, four plus years in production, and I have real iOS experience too.
On the web3 side I was Developer Advocate and Software Engineer at Conflux Network, working on the core in Go plus TypeScript and Solidity. I’ve also contributed to Decred as an open source contributor. I did the Encode Club ZK Bootcamp in Q2 2023 and the Solidity Bootcamp in Q3 2023. That certificate is an NFT on Polygon, token #5975, wallet luisantoniocrag, if anyone wants to check it instead of taking my word for it.
Right now my day job is building Android software for a Class II medical device, a hemodialysis system. It’s a regulated environment where “we’ll fix it in the next release” is not an answer you’re allowed to give. That has probably been the most useful thing I’ve learned in years, and it translates pretty directly to reviewing proposals that spend treasury money.
Why I think that’s useful here
Part of the Council’s work is reviewing ZenIPs for feasibility and keeping an eye on how the DAO spends. Feasibility is an engineering call, and it’s easy to get wrong in a quiet way. The proposal sounds reasonable, everyone agrees, and a year and a half later you find out what it actually costs to operate.
I’ve been responsible for systems where getting that wrong meant money didn’t move for real merchants on a Sunday afternoon. I know what a throughput number costs to actually support, and I know how much of a project’s real cost tends to show up after launch instead of in the budget.
The other thing I keep noticing is mobile. ZEN is on Base now and the whole thesis is consumer apps and zkApps. Consumer crypto happens on a phone. The Council has good coverage on games, protocol, security and community, but nobody whose actual job is shipping mobile apps to users.
I’d commit to
Mobile and integrations as a grants priority. I’d push the grant criteria toward things people can actually use on a phone: wallet and payments UX, mobile SDKs, integrations that put ZEN inside an app flow instead of another dashboard. I’ll do the technical review on those applications myself and mentor the teams that get funded. I’ve onboarded developers before as a DevRel and I’ve led teams with very mixed experience levels.
Spanish language onboarding, done regularly instead of announced once. LATAM is one of the biggest underserved developer populations in crypto and I’ve already done this work for Horizen. Monthly Spanish technical content on building on Horizen and Base, plus a recurring live session for Spanish speaking devs. Community safety belongs in here too. Scam and phishing campaigns hit non-English communities hardest because the warnings never get translated in time.
Disclosures
I worked at Conflux Network as Developer Advocate and Software Engineer. That role is over and I have no ongoing relationship or position there. I’ve also contributed to Decred as an open source contributor. I’m bringing both up myself rather than waiting for someone to find them, and I’m happy to answer questions about either in this thread.
I’m not employed by, an owner of, or a beneficial interest holder in any entity currently represented on the Council.
On availability: I started a new full time engineering job in August. I’ve looked at the monthly briefings and the ZenIP review load against that and I can carry it. The review work above is evenings and weekends, and the fair way to judge me is whether the reviews show up on time.
Closing
I’m not the best known name on this ballot and I’m not going to win on recognition. What I can offer is someone who has shipped payment infrastructure at real scale, who works under actual compliance pressure every day, and who is willing to put a technical opinion in writing before a vote instead of after it.
Happy to take questions in this thread, including about last year.