It is perfectly legitimate as it is. The direct line of spending from my inflation is not.
Iâm sure it is currently. I also agree that unnecessary spending is something to avoid.
Itâs about the future of the project. Which is why coinholder representation is required, because currently as it is set up, it incentivises more unnecessary spending as the pot increases.
This proposal does not actually solve anything, it merely pretends to solve. Stakeholders would indeed be a minority so itâs only to pretend like we are part of this.
ZCG is much better independent from us.
That is actually a misconception. Essentially what youâre employing is an âall-or-nothingâ logic which I fundamentally disagree with.
You are assuming the vote will ALWAYS be 3-2 (assuming the 5 person committee). Under the current system if one ZCG member votes 'NOâ to funding as itâs wasteful itâll still go ahead, whereas with 2 coinholder elected members it becomes the swing vote, and instead of 4-1 itâll be 2-3.
And itâs not just about the vote, itâs about having a voice in the conversation/discussion, challenge spending. Even if a bad grant is approved can report back to forum âWe voted against this because xyz but got pushed through, here are the detailsâ
Itâs just more conducive to a transparent system.
So no, I donât think itâs pointless. I would rather have 40% vote representation and a seat at table than nothing.
Iâm employing an 'elegantâ or nothing. This arbitrary 40% is the perfect opposite of elegant improvement.
Nothing âelegantâ about having no representation.
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ZCGâs independence wonât be changed by this at all. Changing to a minority of seats elected once a year by coinholders is unlikely to negatively effect the quality of candidates.
Probably two separate election ballots, but I expect in general the same candidates would run for both. i.e. ZCAP elect the majority seats, and coinholders elect the minority seats.
It might be that some candidates run only on one ballot, or the other.
But can you see how this modest proposal brings both governance minimisation, a balanced leadership class which is subject to perpetual opposition, and increases the overall accountability of the leadership class. (In this case the leadership class being the ZCG committee.)
Itâs positively Machiavellian.
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Like, by definition, they will no longer be independent. With your proposal, ZCG will depend on stakeholders to determine 40% of their seats.
Direct accountability once a year. The ZCG committee left alone to make their own decisions based on norms they develop to continue the Zcash mission, until their term ends.
Why should reasonably compensated, competent people fear being held to account for their performance once a year by the ones who voted for them to the position?
As a passive coinholder who is busy and doesnât want to read every proposal in detail, would you not want to also have a say?
This gives coinholders a fair shake in holding ZCG folk to account.
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The only two things I want regarding ZCG are:
- Ensure alignment
- Determine budget
Right now, Iâm happy with both. The way I see things, Iâd gladly accept their proposal for another year if they just describe what theyâve been doing. But stakeholders need to be in control of their wealth, therefore including how the inflation is used, if at all.
This thread is exciting; there are so many great ideas floating around.
I had some thoughts and wanted to share one possible direction:
What I outlined here is intentionally a first-draft concept exploring some ideas. Many technical and procedural details would still require thorough community discussion (voting mechanics, exact thresholds, edge cases, etc.).
The guiding idea is to respect the different strengths of each group instead of conflating roles:
⢠Coin holders bear the economic risk â they should set the overall grant-budget ceiling (or a narrow percentage band) for the coming year.
⢠ZCAP, as the group with the deepest day-to-day understanding of ecosystem needs, continues to elect the five ZCG members who allocate funds within that ceiling.
⢠The elected ZCG publishes a short, public one-pager with strategic priorities and evaluation criteria â clear accountability without added bureaucracy.
To avoid short-term speculation or whale dominance in the coin-holder vote, eligibility could be limited to addresses that have continuously held ZEC for at least 12â24 months â a lightweight, on-chain verifiable mechanism that requires no KYC or central registry (similar to ideas floated in the past).
Day-to-day grant operations would remain fast and unbureaucratic. Only truly exceptional opportunities that exceed the ceiling would trigger a specific, time-bound override request for coin-holder approval.
Overall, the aim is a system that is:
⢠simple and low-friction to implement,
⢠resistant to capture by short-term or concentrated interests,
⢠respectful of both financial risk and technical/ecosystem expertise.
Very happy to refine this further with anyone who wants to dig into the details.
Anaximander
ZCG candidate â December 2025
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I think I like this.
Could it essentially become part of the quarterly Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program?
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just want to mention the way currently coin voting works safest way is moving coins to new wallet for voting period - so none of those addresses could ever vote in that case 
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Governance
I see ZCGâs role as forward-looking: funding strategic projects that wouldnât exist (or would take much longer) without the committeeâs push.
Retroactive funding works for rewarding past work, but it canât create the future. For that you need a panel that can say âyesâ to something that only exists on paper today.
Thatâs why I believe we still need ZCG (or something like it) for the proactive, high-risk bets.
A simple yearly coin-holder vote on the total ZCG budget envelope (and perhaps an exceptional override for very large projects) would give stakeholders real power, while keeping day-to-day decisions fast and expert-driven.
We could even align the dates with the quarterly Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants votes to keep it simple.
Add the one-pager transparency (key criteria + strategic priorities published on the forum) by ZCG and we have the best of both worlds.
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Thank you. This is an important technical detail.
I see two ways to overcome this â either they move into a new wallet and during a certain time it is locked (e.g., 1 or 2 years) and it would be forward-looking, or we could introduce a transition period the time to fulfill the conditions.
Are there other alternatives than to move into another wallet? Why is it the safest way?
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have you used the current coin voting app?
to use it you have to insert a seedphrase to vote.
and if anyone wants to vote with coins held in hardware wallet or your active wallet without having to later create a new seed for that they would need to move the coins into a new wallet for the voting registration period.
for top security reasons you would never insert a hardware wallets seed into a computer
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you can vote with transparent coins then.
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As the Speculation continue @vaspholdings Made a great point and I just want the message not going over the community as we look for answers within the coin holder voting situation.
Leaders want to maintain and extend their power and privilege
The Machiavellians (as outlined by Burnham) assert that ââŚthe primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power.â Even in democracies, the masses are often unable to hold their leaders accountable; and makes democracies particularly susceptible to powerful leaders forcing their wills upon the people â a phenomenon the Machiavellians call âBonapartismâ.
When left unchecked by other powers, âBonapartistâ leaders are likely to arise in democratic organizations, claiming âto be the most perfect embodiment of the will of the group, the people. Everything, therefore, is permitted to him since he is merely the symbol of the group as a whole.â Applied to DAOs, this principle suggests that DAO leaders could perpetuate their own power â or that token holders could face difficulty in holding them accountable.
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The agreement was that the founding team would receive the âfounders reward" for a limited period as payment for their work establishing the Zcash blockchain. When this period expired they forked Zcash and created a new blockchain which they transferred the Zcash trademark to. The only unethical thing here is transferring the Zcash trademark to this new blockchain, unless you think you had an agreement with the founders that they would continue working on the non-devfund fork after the founders reward expired, but that is unreasonable because the founders reward was compensation for work up until that point not future work.
Putting aside that the agreement was upheld on the Ycash fork, your agreement was with the founding team, not âZcashâ. I donât feel I need to defend every action by the ECC to claim that the dev fund is legitimate. Zcash is a blockchain, not a database service run by the ECC. The devfund is not the property of the ECC. The ZCG was not even part of the founding team, and they are the only ones who are still receiving funding that is not controlled by coinholders.
The founding team has no authority to say which fork is the true Zcash. You can say that Ycash is the true Zcash, and there is nothing the founders can do to stop you.
Not just the trademark, they would have had to let go of the ZEC name. Instead they have used their position of power to keep ZEC, coordinated with exchanges, etc. They, technically, definitely, could have used a different ticker if they wanted to. They did not want to.
While they have used a stakeholder pool to justify their decision, another thing they didnât do, is mention the participation rate of ~0.1%.
You can try to rationalize it anyway you want, at the end itâll remain that: a shady move.