Hello, friends! We’ve been talking with the Foundation, and we thought it necessary to clarify our position in advance of the next round of polling.
The Electric Coin Company plans to decline to accept the funds if it comes with a fiat-denominated funding cap. This is because — as we explained in our recent blog post — we will accept money to take on a role only if we believe we can succeed at it, long-term. We believe the deep incentive-alignment from a ZEC-denominated funding stream is necessary to succeed at that role. We’ve considered some of the proposed solutions that have been brought up and we do not think they are tenable.
This raises a question that I think the community needs to align on before finalizing the ballot for the next round of polling, which is: if the polling were to show that a fiat-denominated cap were required by the community, then what would the community do with the slice that it had intended to allocate to ECC? Would that slice then go to the Zcash Foundation, or what? I think people need to have an understanding of what would happen in that case before we go to the next round of polling, so that they know what they’re voting on.
Aside from that issue, we do not see any other blocker issues on Draft ZIP 1014 or the Foundation’s most recent proposed ballot questions. If the community offered us that role without the fiat-denominated cap, we currently see no reason why we couldn’t accept.
Note that we have a couple of more issues with the current Draft ZIP 1014 and the current proposed ballot. They aren’t blockers for ECC taking the role, but they are things that we think the community should talk about and potentially amend the draft ZIP text before the next round of polling. I’m working on a follow-up post about that.