Dev Fund 2024: Community Poll & Discussion Megathread

Governance
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The context here is that Zcash100 has an account from yesterday which is perplexing in its current activity/ and at-face-value well formed ideas today. PKR made these points more crassly.

That sort of an account situation looks like sock-puppeting but we have no way to know and what is the point of a witch hunt? (what benefit is gained by an experienced Zcash forum user who decides to build a new account for the purposes of churning/ multiplying their existing opinions?).

For the as accused trolls, sure there are a handful, but you canā€™t take from them their consistency in showing up/ telling the same tried & true opinions. They donā€™t seem like sock puppet accounts.

This thread has been spiraling off topic a lot recently.

@aquietinvestor are there plans to rerun a similar poll and continuation thread for 2024? It feels like many of the opinions and inclinations for the next block reward cycle could be packaged up into another set of questions. (Iā€™m thinking of polling about 1. changes to the fee amount, 2. Zenate Yes/No, 3. ZCG compensation, 4. new/ additional wallet building priorities, 5. Namada airdrop)

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I donā€™t have plans to create another poll, but Iā€™ll keep this one open as it seems to be a good measure of community sentiment. You can definitely create your own poll if youā€™d like to ask the community about other issues. ZCG compensation will be included in the upcoming Helios poll conducted by ZF.

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The following question has been included in the latest ZCAP poll:

In principle, would you support the introduction of a new funding mechanism to replace the current Dev Fund when it expires in November 2024?

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With about 25% of poll respondents above describing that the block reward should be removed completely, why isnā€™t ZCAP being polled about that outcome?

It would be very helpful to see how ZCAP opinions match up with the votes cast in this ad-hoc poll of Zcash forum voters.

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@Dodger What does " new funding mechanism mean as it relates to the poll? Does this mean a) transaction fees b) another variation of block rewards or c) something else?

What is missing from the poll is some limitation non development spending. I would also like to see the Dev Fund to be restricted to direct/actual blockchain and asset (UDA/stablecoin) development for at least 85%-90% of spending. We have had a fairly massive increase in the scope and use of funding way beyond the actual blockchain and asset development (such as overhead, marketing, politics, and other non development activities). With that, we need a clear path to get off of inflationary spending.

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Is there any objective metrics that show having a block reward funding a foundation, development team and grants committee has had a material impact on Zcash compared to the market as a whole?

Unfortunately, we are not in 2018 any longer.

  • New blockchains launch and grow communitiesā€™ almost daily.
  • Stark based zkvmā€™s are being optimized, snark rollups as L2 are prolific.
  • ZK based privacy chains are on the rise.

Chains with a treasury have not risen to the top of market cap or adoption. This thread has convinced me there are people who are being funded who would like to maintain their funding. I have not seen any metric based arguments around having ECC and ZF grew our user base x% compared to who do not have central planning and for this reason we should continue funding them out of the block reward

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Agreed. High-impact projects have a longer lifecycle and would provide more value + reduce busywork overhead from a full-time committee.

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Imo, this question is highly ambiguous and requires rewriting.

If a poller is against the continuation of the devfund, should he answer

Yes: In principle, I would support the introduction of a new funding mechanism to replace the current Dev Fund when it expires in November 2024.

Find your own funding. Donā€™t get money from the devfund.

No: In principle, I would not support the introduction of a new funding mechanism to replace the current Dev Fund when it expires in November 2024.

No new devfund. Let it expire.

It should be at least 3 options:

  • renew as is
  • renew with modifications
  • do not renew
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The results of the ZCAP poll are in, with 80% of respondents indicating that they would, in principle, support the introduction of a new funding mechanism to replace the current Dev Fund when it expires in November 2024.

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I thought this was a cool idea. So much so that I spent some thousands of hours building Free2Z. What are the differences between f2z and what you have in mind?

The main strength of f2z is really solid iterative software fundamentals - Iā€™m really good at changing software. Itā€™s weird that I get little feedback about the direction of f2z but sometimes I see folks imagine new platforms.

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itā€™s very hard for me to tell what free2Z is. is it social media? How is this related to Zcash /
money?

what i have in mind for a community funding is a list of projects where a person who wants funding can set forth all of the elements of their project, set a funding request, and then the community can send money to fund it. ZEC, USDT or whatever they want. this is not ZCG funding. these are for edge and non blockchain related proejcts. what i call the edge

there are many examples to copy out there. UIUX is critical. kick starter is one of the more popular sites. and monero didnā€™t look too bad.

To me, free2z would fall into the type of project that should be funded from the community.

the community funding would be part of zechub or zcash or something. (we have way to many websites by the way. itā€™s very confusing. but thatā€™s another topic).

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dis is literally wat free2Z allows u to do also. yes the funding UI bars are not implemented. but otherwise its possible to send ZEC so far to - fundraising pages

or im misunderstandin?

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This particular thread on the Dev Fund is already insanely epic so maybe these comments could be split here:

Briefly though, weā€™re still looking for frontend help. Weā€™re fullstack guys. UI/UX is certainly important. But, people should consider and value the solid backend functionality and security. Frontend and layout stuff are malleable. Iā€™ve seen 2 monero sites and they look interesting ā€¦ but scratch the surface ā€¦ lots of details to attend to ā€¦

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The question was not clear and I suspect many ZCAP members voted not the way they intended to. ZF should recognize that to get a clear response from ZCAP; and by extension a mandate to execute on ZCAPs behalf, the questions must be clear.

I wish the ZF Board would be more engaged to ensure that the questions put to ZCAP are unambiguous, clear, and easy to understand.

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A more meaningful poll would have been something clear/ void of abstractions.

Do you support:

  • Renewing the Dev Fund as it is currently
  • Renewing the Dev Fund in a modified form
  • Eliminating the Dev Fund
  • I have no strong opinion about the Dev Fund Decision
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Is there any significant faction here who believes that the entire devfund should go to one non-profit with a single, clear mission statement?

The idea to ā€œdecentralizeā€ by going from 1 entity to 2 entities was a clear mistake, in hindsight. Dividing into more entities would be folly. Wouldnā€™t it be more efficient to have the overhead of 1 single structure instead of multiples? One unified vision? Of course, we could modify the course and reprioritize continuously and ā€œdecentralizeā€ or democratize decision making. But, it would be more efficient to iterate on these mechanisms with 1 organization. We could decide how funds would be split up, we could use data and iterative feedback. But, I donā€™t think that 2 Chiefs is more decentralized than 1. Perhaps the bipolarity even tends towards not decentralizing.

One Devfund that goes through One Structure that continuously improves on the efficiency of what is delivered to the community.

Letā€™s flip the language around a bit. The word ā€œdecentralizedā€ gives me a warm fuzzy too and the word ā€œcentralizedā€ usually makes me want to grab my pitchfork. But, letā€™s think about these words a bit too:

Unified, cohesive, coherent, integrated, organized, focused, aligned, concentratedā€¦

and also

Disjointed, discombobulated, disorganized, unintegrated, scattered, siloed, fragmented, chaotic, incoherent, uncoordinated, splintered ā€¦

Iā€™d go further and say that we should build one big, beautiful repository with everything integrated together and all devfund recipients working in that same wonderful, mythical multi-package code heaven where everything always has to work together in the trunk. But, I donā€™t want to scare anyone off so I wonā€™t mention that a single monolithic codebase is a great way to deliver cohesive products that work together over time.

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Is there any significant faction here who believes that the entire devfund should go to one non-profit with a single, clear mission statement?

Yes. Monorepo ftw. Keep it simple, stupid!

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well, lots of people hate monorepo and I donā€™t want to start a VIM/Emacs thing about it again ā€¦ but ā€¦ at least one organization ā€¦ like ZF could host their own gitlab ā€¦ developing those democratic rules around the trunk branch(s) though ā€¦ thatā€™s where the real decentralization is ;9 If not a true monorepo then at least being able to define what the entire code base is.

Still, I do think that all of the books, websites, nodes, wallets, docs, ZIPs ā€¦ everything being in sync on a single trunk is totally feasible and makes it so that people could find and improve things a lot more easily than having to constantly be like ā€œdude, which repo is this?ā€ ā€¦ darn! Iā€™m starting to get verbose in favor of monorepo. Sorry, guys, itā€™s like a character flaw or sth ā€¦

OTOH, zebra is already a monorepo, so lean into that where it makes sense ā€¦

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VIM > Emacs. Unless youā€™re an octopus, I guess.

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Yes. Yes. Yes. As we sit here today, we need one mission, one vision, one treasury, and to execute as one team. Its a farce for one single source of funding (Zec holders) to be funding so many orgs and then call it decentralization. Its effectively not real decentralization its disintermediation. As you rightly point out, its inefficient, and wasteful. Maybe at a $10+ billion market cap, it might make sense to have more verticals. But we dont. And, verticals usually are defined by their independently earned revenue as a line of business or product line, not politics or splitting up the same vertical (EG we have one vertical, ZEC, split into 3 pieces). Its very wasteful because one of the 3 pieces might need more money than the others at any given time. A static allocation of money as opposed to a dynamic knowledge based allocation is not effective. And on top of that, we have a ā€œSustainability Fundā€ trying to capture future transaction fees before we even have a fee structure in place. Eliminate them all and simplify under one umbrella/org. They need to work as a team and not use the orgs as fiefdoms to do what they want without oversight. @joshs plan is an outline for how to split up responsibilities: L1 (core blockchain, POS, Sync Times, etc), L2 (ZSA, Stablecoins, RWA, NFT), L3 (Wallets, Crosschain, DEX, CEX) as one way to look at it (im sure there is more). Currently I cant tell which org is responsible for what.

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