Well in this case…
I’d like to bring up a point which I haven’t seen mentioned recently. The idea guiding ZIP 1014 is:
ZOMG is not supposed to be the third entity; it’s supposed to sponsor the third, fourth and perhaps fifth entities, while leaving small grant-making to ZF.
Recall, the envisioned model was having two grant streams:
- Regular (“minor”) grants on the scale from meme production to small development projects, would be issued through the ZF grant system. There would be many of these, and they would be decided, supervised and handheld by ZF staff.
- Major Grants would be few but very large, feeding projects of a scale approaching ECC or ZF. When prospective major “entities” shows up, with the ability to build sustained, in-house capabilities, the money would be there to support them. This is why ZIP 1014 talks about “bolster teams with substantial (current or prospective) continual existence, and set them up for long-term success”. This is why it has such a huge fraction of the Dev Fund, 40%, more than either ZF or ECC. The vision was supporting a small handful of such large entities, perhaps 2 or 3 at a time. They’d be large enough to not need much handholding. The ZOMG would be there to vet them, keep an eye on things, and stop renewing their funding if things go awry.
Indeed, according to the brief history of Zcash decentralization, this is where we were supposed to be now:
But that not today’s reality, is it?
What really happened is that ZF mostly froze its own (“minor”) grant program, around the time ZIP 1014 went into effect. This put the burden on MGRC/ZOMG to handle all the grant proposals, including small and “needier” ones. That’s far more time consuming (as those of us who served on ZF’s internal grant committee, back when it existed, are well aware).
Conversely, the large grant applications by “third entity”-class major players, of which at least one was tentative, haven’t materialized! My conjecture is that the explosion of DeFi, around the same time, hoovered up all the teams and attention. The Zcash Dev Fund, despite its amazing long-term prospects, could not compete with the financial conjuring magic and immediate gratification of DeFi token issuance.
Now, all of those changes are legitimate decisions by the relevant parties, and strictly speaking none of this contradicts ZIP 1014. And yet, the offshoot is that we find ourselves trying to shoehorn responsibilities into a body that was never designed, equipped or compensated to handle them. You can’t cook steak on a lava lamp.