In roughly the past 12 calendar months, the Electric Coin Company spent on an average $450,000-550,000 every month on activities characterized as “Growth and Regulatory” and “General Admin”.
These are the past 12 months where the Zcash ecosystem had the majority of its primary use cases broken. Wallets did not sync, user funds were effectively locked, and full node operation became unfeasible (causing the network node distribution to drop down to the neighborhood of 150-170, hardly decentralized if you ask me). The long term damage to Zcash that happened since June 2022 is hard to truly measure.
$6,000,000 total dollars were spent by ECC on non-development activities. Can any of you imagine a grant requestor to ZCG demanded $450,000 a month of funding for what are intangible and occasionally Zcash adjacent-only projects?
Part of phasing out the Dev Fund will involve the instigation of some serious soul searching for the Electric Coin Company. Zcash at 7 years of life remains, relatively speaking, unused compared to many of its 2015-2017 conceived altcoin peers. The value proposition of ZEC has been totally abysmal, which I assert plays in as a huge driver of Zcash’s lack of use. The abysmal performance of ZEC is also what is driving so much dissent in this thread. We’ve really got to ask ourselves, what does “Growth” mean to the Electric Coin Company and what have they been spending all of that money and other resources on?
The Dev Fund organizations have spent too much free money in endeavors that demonstrably have not accrued value to Zcash. There are also plenty of risk assessment and management problems in our rear view mirror (and on the road ahead).
A new concept of protocol self-funding should involve the phasing out of the Dev Fund in some rough approximation to the upgrade to Proof of Stake (hopefully this deliverable is nearing mainnet by late 2024 or early 2025). The ECC and Foundation and ZCG can all continue (post Dev Fund) to support this ecosystem, while generating passive income by way of ZEC staking/ validating rewards on what will be huge sums of ZEC by the time Proof of Stake arrives. (Keep in mind that the dev funding mechanism will certainly remain in place for another 16-17 months into the future. This current debate only ponders what to do after the late 2024 halving).
I’ll be spending time to review the past year or two of Zcash Foundation tax documents and transparency reports and share any notable findings there also (I do not intend this critique of ECC to imply that I’ve got a favorite among these two). In order for Zcash to fulfil its mission as a network for decentralized private money, there cannot be any more reliance on these big two Dev Fund institutions that have done some excellent work, but who have also cost Zcash and the community so much.