Why not? What would need to change before you’d be prepared to apply for it?
Also, what do you envisage happening if your proposal were to be adopted and ECC opted not to apply for the role of Principal Developer?
Finally, there appears to be no limit on the share of (in % terms) or cap on (in $ terms) the “outside development fee” for a single developer, meaning that a single outside developer could conceivably receive, say, 39% of the Dev Fund (possibly more if the Principal Developer didn’t take more than 20%). Am I reading that correctly?
Interested in hearing from @acityinohio as to whether this would be an option (given the ZF’s structure).
For the company, exclusivity. We’re a studio model with a few products and existing fiduciary responsibilities. Our work is a good complement, actually, so I think it’s a strength, but prevents that role from making sense for us.
From the company, I think we’d need to focus more heavily on research.
It’s required to go to at least two teams, and I thought I’d made that an even split in the worst case… will confirm, there definitely needs to be a max.
Depends on whether that means the ECC left Zcash, or they applied for outside dev.
If the ECC applied for outside dev and there’s enough notice, I’d consider a restructure that allowed us to apply for the primary dev position, and prepare for any other changes that would make that amenable to the community.
If the ECC doesn’t apply for any of the dev, however, this would be a difficult turn. If individuals at the ECC still wanted to work on Zcash, I’d reach out and consider making offers, or helping set up a new corporate entity so they have a path to so that.
The latter seems unlikely, considering the dedication I’ve seen over the years and the people involved, but I’m not in the position to know where everyone stands
Fair point @Dodger, we have purposefully avoided this work due to the rather ambiguous IRS guidelines on what constitutes “too much lobbying” for 501(c)(3)s. Given that we’re one of the first, high-profile US-based nonprofits with a focus on cryptocurrency I’m very concerned the signal that would be sent if we were found in violation of these rules, which is why we’ve avoided it altogether.
If it were deemed too risky, would a separate eg 501(c)(6) make sense @acityinohio? Alternatively a dev fee recipient could specialize in this piece, though providing the same sort of accountability for lobbying would be tough.
My gut says we have the tools to solve this in this structure
While I agree that it would be a win, I’m having trouble imagining this succeeding.
I think I see where you’re coming from — the Zcash community should have multiple independent organizations supporting it. I’m strongly in favor of that goal.
However, based on what I know about the current people and organisations in the Zcash and cryptocurrency communities, I’m not sure this approach would reach that goal.
I’m not aware of any other organizations which have either the ability or the willingness to pick up the pieces of the flywheel if ECC were forced to abandon some of them. I’m not currently aware of anyone who would be willing and able to create and run such an organization. Maybe I’m wrong! Maybe there are people who have the experience and the dedication to shoulder these responsibilities on behalf of the Zcash community. If so, let’s hear from them.
Once again, so you don’t have to scroll up , here’s yet another copy of the slide from our presentation:
I wondered if maybe you (Matt/Keep) or Zfnd were contemplating offering to shoulder those roles, but so far in this thread the answers from you and from Josh Cincinnati appear to be negative.
To be clear, I think the goal of having multiple, fully independent organizations supporting Zcash is a fantastic goal. That’s why, years ago, I pledged to donate half of all my personal Zcash coins to the Zcash Foundation, so that it would have the funding necessary to ramp up while I continued to focus on building and operating my organization. The Zcash Foundation is still in possession of the vast majority of that money.
I think we as the Zcash community should have more organisations serving us, but we should adopt a plan with a clear path to success, and we’ll need an experienced board or strategic council to implement the plan and mitigate the risks along the way.
While I support the intent, I currently have a lot of uncertainty about what would happen with this proposal.
I’m down! We’ve got the engineering, product, and legal expertise to slot in for engineering, adoption, and/or demand. I just can’t take the exclusivity requirement of the principal dev with our portfolio approach.
EDIT:
Sorry if I’ve appeared hesitant here. I’m not, I just want to make sure the governance isn’t too tailored around us versus what the community needs.
By the way, Matt, thank you for investing so much of your valuable time into this process and thank you for engaging so patiently and constructively with others. You’ve really moved the ball forward and I am optimistic about the process. Thank you for contributing to Zcash!
Having different dev orgs doing different parts of that ‘flywheel’ setup doesn’t do much for resilience.
Surely a better approach is for dev orgs to take on all aspects, they could certainly specialize in some areas but just cherry-picking the bits they like will result in the overall mission becoming dependent on all players.
Doing this whole operation full-stack is a very heavy lift, and makes it difficult for the community or ZF to express dissatisfaction with particular components of the execution.
I do hear you though. Ideally we’d have a few teams with some specialization for efficiency, and some overlap for resilience. That’s one of the reasons I’ve leaned toward a model where each recipient might have a client they primarily maintain (though it’s too unruly to make it a real requirement)
Keep in mind, the idea with the flywheel and the way we are structured is that the elements work together - sustained momentum across a number of activities. Each flow into each other. It’s a sum is greater than its parts model along a clearly aligned vector.
Totally, and bundling is likely more efficient. But if budgets get low enough, the regulatory landscape shifts drastically, etc, the entire flywheel can’t survive. That’s an economic reality.
Evidence here is that we’ve seen other projects without this full-stack effort succeed.
Maybe each dev org focuses on their thing but also has to provide resources (ie: people) to work on other bits of that flywheel, those extra resources take their lead from the dev org responsible for that.
Clunky to manage & messy, but would make for interesting teams to work with & keep the dev orgs in sync.
I think it’s too soon to tell if anyone has succeeded. Certainly not as a globally adopted uncensorable sov/moe - now add cryptography / privacy in the face of increasing surveillance.
How did this go by the way? Have any of these projects eventually delivered or had any progress in their research?
Would the ZF consider funding such open ended research again?
The reason why I ask is because right now, the research for Zcash is quite centralized between the ECC, the ZF and some academics at a university. In the spirit of decentralization and coming from my experience doing open source research for Ethereum, I would say there is value in funding community members to do research on Zcash. Typically, these community members are already working on something. It’s a matter of funding. Another way to encourage community members to participate in Zcash research is to have a short-term fellowship program. The EF used to have something like this called a Hackternship. It gave one the ability to work on an interesting project for 10 weeks and a flat grant of $10k. This was how I kickstarted doing research for Ethereum, even though I was an undergraduate research assistant for a year, working on blockchain-related, although, orthogonal work.
@mhluongo Would a legal advisory firm be eligible in this case for the dev fee? Currently, it’s scoped for R&D and engineering. Based on your answers about the ECC splitting and being focused on other aspects, I would say yes. Is this a correct characterization?
, here’s yet another copy of the slide from our presentation:
Certainly not as a globally adopted uncensorable sov/moe - now add cryptography / privacy in the face of increasing surveillance.