Last week, the Zcash community was polled to determine whether there was a consensus to create a new Development Fund (Dev Fund) after the current fund expires in November.
Seven proposals were submitted, including an option to not renew the Dev Fund and allocate 100% of the block rewards to miners.
Both proposals specify that the Dev Fund will be allocated to a “lockbox” where the funds will accrue pending a new disbursement mechanism and strategy. Their differences are in duration and whether some funding should flow to ZCG. This is described and highlighted below.
Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund: Transitioning to a Non-Direct Funding Model ): This proposal would last for [edit] up to one year [/edit] and allocate 20% of the block rewards: 12% to a lockbox designated for future decentralized grants funding and 8% to Zcash Community Grants. For more information, see Alternative 2 in ZIP
For Decentralized Grants Allocation (20% Option): This proposal would last [edit] up to two years [/edit] and allocate 20% of the block rewards to a lockbox designated for future decentralized grants funding. For more information, see For more information, see Alternative 3 in ZIP.
The ZecHub, Spanish, Brazil, ZURE, and ECC ZAC poll owners have committed to this process. We also encourage @Dodger and @hanh to consider running this poll with the ZF ZCAP and coinholders.
Format:
Polls will open July 20 at 00:00 UTC and close on July 28th at 09:00 UTC
The poll will be one question, asking the pollee to select their preference between the two options. They will be able to abstain by not selecting either
The proposal authors will weigh in on this thread in the coming day to outline the pros and cons of their proposal
Thanks for reading and for all the discussion and collaboration!
In service of ensuring that the community is as fully informed as possible going into this runoff poll, @aquietinvestor and I have agreed to publicly debate the merits of the two finalist proposals.
I will start by saying that I have been very pleased overall with the way that the process of proposal and decision-making has played out, and I will be pleased to support whichever one of the two finalists is ultimately selected by the community. Both options lay the foundation for exciting new options for development of the Zcash ecosystem. That being said, I slightly prefer the option to defer the full 20% development share to the lockbox, instead of continuing direct funding for the Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) group.
In sending the full 20% development share of the block subsidy to the lockbox, this proposal fully aligns the interests of all prospective recipients of development funding toward developing a fair and decentralized disbursement mechanism. It avoids granting any special or preferred status to any entity in the ecosystem, and encourages all of the interested parties to work together to design and build a new system, including the current recipients of funding from ZCG. I consider such alignment of interests to be essential; if ZCG remains as a source of funding for parts of the ecosystem, those recipients need not remain fully engaged with the design of the new system, and I believe that it’s essential for the smaller grantees that ZCG has historically served be heavily involved in this design process.
I believe that the ZCG committee itself will have an important role to play in a future system; in any grant-based model, there is a significant amount of work to be done in organizing how grant proposals are presented and vetted; if anything, this transition will likely cause ZCG’s role to grow in importance. As such, it’s vital that they too be involved in the design of the new system, to codify what role the committee will play and how its efforts may be compensated.
Removing guaranteed funding for ZCG recipients is not without its potential drawbacks; however, it is my belief that in aligning the interests of all the recipients of development funding, it makes it highly likely that a replacement system can be developed and deployed within a short time frame. There are already a couple of interesting proposals under discussion (Zcash Funding Bloc and Loan-Directed Retroactive Grants take on different parts of the design problem) and I am confident that if the full 20% development share is directed to the lockbox, development of these and other ideas will proceed rapidly and with creative input from all the participants in the ecosystem.
We are truly entering a new era for the Zcash ecosystem, and I believe that in doing so, we should start with a clean slate.
The Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund would last for one year and allocate 20% of the block rewards as follows: 12% to a lockbox designated for future decentralized grants funding and 8% to Zcash Community Grants. In my opinion, there are key advantages of the Hybrid proposal over the 20% Lockbox proposal:
Benefits
Financial Stability: ZCG does not have the financial runway that ECC and ZF have. By allocating 8% of the block rewards to ZCG, the Hybrid proposal ensures that the community grants program can continue to support independent development projects within the Zcash ecosystem without the uncertainty of future funding.
Promoting Decentralization: Allocating a portion of the Dev Fund to ZCG ensures that small teams continue to receive funding to contribute to Zcash. In contrast, allocating 100% of the Dev Fund to a lockbox would disproportionately impact grant recipients. This Hybrid proposal promotes decentralization and supports the growth of independent development teams.
Independent Projects and Contributors: The Hybrid proposal ensures ZCG has the ability to continue to fund valuable projects like ZecHub, YWallet, Zingo!, the Maya Protocol integration, Zcash Shielded Assets, the coinholder voting mechanism, shielded integration with Ledger, Zcash Media, development of the Avalanche bridge, Zcash Brazil, and core contributors like Hanh, Least Authority, and QEDIT.
Transitioning to a Non-Direct Funding Model: According to recent sentiment polls, the community strongly prefers a future Dev Fund that operates as a grants-based, non-direct funding model. The Hybrid proposal helps facilitate this transition smoothly. By allocating funds to specific projects rather than organizations, ZCG helps encourage diverse participation from independent developers and teams.
Mitigating Regulatory Risk: The current Dev Fund is entirely allocated to US entities. Under the Hybrid proposal, ZCG is administered by the Financial Privacy Foundation (FPF), a non-profit organization incorporated and based in the Cayman Islands, and not the Zcash Foundation. By allocating funding to a non-US organization, the Hybrid proposal helps reduce potential regulatory scrutiny and legal risk.
Drawbacks
Direct Funding: The primary drawback of the Hybrid proposal is that recent community sentiment polls indicate the community does not want individual entities to receive direct funding. Although ZCG allocates funding to independent development teams, it still constitutes a form of direct funding because an address for ZCG is embedded into the protocol.
ZCG Exception: As mentioned above, the Hybrid proposal gives ZCG an exception to receive direct funding. In contrast, as @nuttycom states, the proposal to allocate 100% of the Dev Fund to a lockbox incentivizes all prospective recipients to work towards developing a decentralized disbursement mechanism, which may be a more fair and impartial approach.
I would love to hear from community members and grant recipients about which proposal they prefer and why.
I’ve expressed a handful of times already, but since this concern is not recognized as a drawback, I’ll share again.
1-year is not enough time to make the outcome worth the effort, especially if this ecosystem ends up being subjected to the kick-off for an entire new “Dev Fund Debate” again in less than 9 months.
Put a different way, I am concerned that only 1-year could accidentally hasten the design and deployment of the NDFM.
I also believe that 12% leaves the lockbox potentially underfunded at the end of just 1 year. The ZEC received will total only about 70-75K (at a hopeful $50 per coin, that is just ~3.6 million dollars.
Will it really be “worth it” to spend a year or two, designing and deploying the NDFM where the end game involves the distribution of just ~3.6 million dollars?
I’m in favor of the 20% proposal because it adds notably greater financial incentives to the NDFM, and because its duration is twice as long.
I hope @aquietinvestor will correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that part of the incentive to put a 1-year limit on his proposal was to attempt to force the community to move quickly to determine a more sustainable long-term strategy. That being said, I’m not sure that it actually incentivizes that; I agree with the rest of your arguments here (though I think that if it takes fully a year from November to deploy the future NDFM, that will be a substantial failure.)
The duration was originally set to two years based on feedback from the initial sentiment polls. However, after I discussed @joshs’s comments on the Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund with @peacemonger, we decided to amend the duration from two years to one year to better align the proposal with @peacemonger’s original vision.
Yes, the one year limit is an attempt to incentivize the community to work together quickly to develop and implement a grants-based, non-direct funding model. In retrospect, it might have made sense to have both a one-year and two-year version of this proposal to give the community more optionality.
I think that would kind of further confuse incentives, because with a two-year version there is less pressure on ZCG. In practice, maybe that wouldn’t make much difference, but I do think that ZCG being involved in the design is important.
This does raise another point for consideration, which is that while ZCG may be incentivized to assist in the new design while the hybrid dev fund is active, depending upon what the final design ends up being they might also be incentivized to delay the deployment of that final design until the year has run its course, in the case that such a final design seems likely to result in less funding for ZCG recipients.
I’m just speaking abstractly here, and don’t intend to make any implications with respect to the people who currently constitute the ZCG committee, including yourself, or their motivations. I would have had the same concern if for example Draft zf-community-dev-fund-2-proposal: Establishing a Hybrid Dev Fund for ZF, ZCG and a Dev Fund Reserve were one of the finalists. Ultimately, the views of respected individuals and organizations have substantial influence to either accelerate or delay community decision-making processes.
Understood. The Hybrid proposal is for one year, which will pass very quickly. I think the entire ecosystem, including ZCG committee members and grant recipients, will recognize the urgency and be motivated to work together to design and implement a sustainable long-term disbursement strategy.
I think it be clarifying for many to share what ZCG currently has in its treasury, outstanding obligations, and how each proposal would impact what it is able to accomplish.
Speaking for myself, I prefer the Decentralized Grants Allocation for the following reasons:
This proposal would last two years
Most polls suggested the community wants to halve the time of the next dev fund, I agree.
A more fair and impartial approach makes sense to me. I agree with the following quote:
ZCG accountability
I have questioned both publicly and privately some concerns I have regarding the communities ability to hold ZCG accountable for actions taken, or not taken. This job is hard, and with the current setup, I’m not sure its fair to both the community and the volunteers who run it, to criticize. However, as @joshs has mentioned, it’s probably most prudent to avoid direct funding. I could be wrong here, but I think its time for change.
With all this stated, I will support either option pending the run off poll, and I want to personally thank everyone who is actively participating in both the voting/opinions as well as the folks who are conducting this very messy governance marathon.
I support Alternative 2 “Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund: Transitioning to a Non-Direct Funding Model”
tl;dr1: I believe that ZCG should continue to receive funding as it is by design a Non-Direct Funding Model of its own which is currently in functions distributing grants to independent contributors those being teams, DAOs or individuals. A 20% lockbox will be disruptive for these community members which are also ZCG grantees.
I celebrate that the community as a whole has decided two things:
Recognizing the importance of continuing to look for ways to fund Zcash development from a portion of the “Miner’s reward” to keep Zcash autonomous.
Move out from a funding model that was not meeting the community’s expectations.
That being said, I repeat: I’m writing this wall-of-text In support of Alternative 2 “Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund: Transitioning to a Non-Direct Funding Model”
What are we moving away from?
The previous Development funding model allowed the Zcash ecosystem to continue innovating and sustaining its own development. Under it, important breakthroughs in ZK proofs and its applications were developed, such as HALO 2 and Orchard. The Zcash community will be able to “Press F for Respect” to Zcashd and move away from the bitcoind legacy code towards a 100% Zebra-powered node. Moreover, one of the most advanced Threshold signature schemes was developed (FROST) which will be a crucial gear within the new system to be developed and it’s getting more and more adopted as we “speak” (read and write in the case of the forum). All of this is great.
But in my modest opinion, there were two HUGE problems with the “Good ol’ Dev Fund”
motivation and incentives (lack of): for some, ZIP-1014 felt like a 4 year blank check. And that lack of accountability was detrimental to the ecosystem orgs. It generated the wrong incentives to the orgs receiving the funds directly from the protocol. It detached the Zcash leadership from the reality of the common zodlers. Deadlines were not “deadly” anymore. release dates would slip by far. Risks were not assessed properly. There was little incentive for the funded orgs be highly cohesive and collaborative with each other; drama and rivalry between the orgs had “zero cost” because at the end of the day, blocks would be mined, ZEC would flow into addresses anyway.
High regulatory risks, liabilities and fear to generate ZEC appreciation: Instead of Zcash being able to be on par with its neighbors and competitors with the “To the moon!!! ” vibe and being able generate excitement, growth, adoption and why not (this is a currency folks!) a price rise. Orgs receiving funds from the protocol had their hands and feet tied and mouth duct taped when it came to promoting Zcash during “bull runs”. I’m not a lawyer but it was pretty clear to me that any directly funding org could be accused of “inside trading” if their actions directly affected ZEC’s price in favorable terms to them. Why? because there a DIRECT link (hardcoded public address) between money influx and asset appreciation. It would be too risky to blatantly promote ZEC as other crypto orgs would do with their own coins. So instead of Zcash main Orgs being able to ride the bull runs and create excitement, ZEC Twitter was kind of “Yes!! you go to the moon folks!! And if you get there, we swear that we didn’t have anything to do with it whatsoever! but we are very supportive and happy for you by the way!” not very appealing isn’t it? All of this also had a very high “lawyer up!” budget which was something mentioned by Dodger and Josh during ZconV.
Where are we going to?
Z-OMG, the spark that led the Non Direct Funding Model
Retrospectively, ZIP-1014 aka “the dev fund” does not seem to have many friends. But honestly, it had one true innovation in it, that in my belief, is what it gave birth to this new NDFM: The Zcash Community Grants committee aka ZCG
Not without its fair amount of problems, ZCG (formerly ZOMG) was created in the light of the “new” ZIP-1014 dev fund. During its first year, very distinguished community members ran for election, won their seats and… well… ZIP meets the real world. Sure enough there were some problems and some drama of course! . But in the end grants started flowing, Committee members were finding better resources, tools and experiences. ZCG became a place where Zodlers could be elected to influence the path of the ecosystem through the grants that were approved (or not). We can argue the elections were not fully democratic because ZCAP would be the corpus of people with the ability to vote. Yet, candidates to ZCG would have to “prove their merit” to the general public, win the election and then “prove their real on-the-job contributions to Zcash” if running for a re-election. If we compare it to ZF or ECC, that’s way more public scrutiny and accountability than any “transparency report” could ensure.
The real value of a NDFM: The grantees
There is no forest without the trees. The only way a Non-direct funding model can succeed is through its grantees. What is the real value of ZCG? Is it the reputation of being among the “5 chairs”? Is it its treasury? It it “the committee” itself?
Zcash Community Grants is the most basic and granular form of “non-direct funding” we have available at the moment. The value of ZCG comes out from its constant feedback loop. It is a Flywheel constituted by the committee, its support staff, the grant candidates, grantees and the Zcash community members overseeing it all.
Grantees either generate new resources, or make use of the existing technical and non-technical resources created by ZF and ECC enhancing their capabilities and revealing their short-comings.
To name a few examples
@ZecHub has been exponentially grown all kinds of Zcash related contents from existing resources that were practically abandoned and put them to good use.
For both of his fans and detractors @hanh’s Ywallet was the only wallet that was not being bricked by the sandblasting;
followed by the huge effort of ZingoLabs that took over ZecWallet’s wreckage, poorly maintained forks of everything and brought that source code back to life. Zingo took the effort of doing the right thing, double down on testing (which I helped them a bit with that) and now are almost using all the official libraries and servers built by ECC that ZecWallet’s creator had forked away from with not so good motives other than short-term goals. Moreover, Zingo created a whole community in central and South America.
@emersonian, who stepped up to keep the zcash infrastructure alive.
You know that I don’t like to be self-referential, but I may have done a thing or two here and there as ZWCD creating tools, libraries, fixing bugs, contributing code, testing, hosting dev calls among others.
@earthrise and Least Authority within their Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead role have audited several projects that wouldn’t be otherwise and mitigated different security threats.
QEDIT’s vanilla ZSA and shielded swaps that are waiting the NU7 Train to get them to their destination.
Zcash Brasil and their whole crew of amazing people spreading the Zcash word in the most wealthy and powerful country of Latin America with more than 180 million potential Zcashers.
Nym integration (with Zingo labs as well)
ChainSafe’s Zcash JS SDK R+D that is complementary of what Brave is doing on their Browser (in a more closed way).
Red Dev’s ZavaX / Red Bridge which will be using FROST and has already found improvement points for it while on design phase.
Diminishing the resources of grantees, endangers the ability of those contributors to keep building on this ecosystem. Contributions from ZCG grantees have proven to make the ecosystem more robust and resilient.
TL;DR2: DON’T LOCKBOX THE GRANTEES
Let’s say this straight: most grantees don’t have a “runway”.
The 20% Lockbox alternative defunds ZCG, which is the only entity that at the moment is funding development and security capabilities in a Non-direct manner as it is the evident choice of funding of the whole community across all the different polls. ZCG Grants are already divided in milestones that mark progress and payments. Additionally, Large or long-running grants have been split in smaller and subsequent grants because of lack of resources due to the ATL coin price. This means that many grantees have already made compromises to meet ZCG and the community half way. Many Grants may just be living milestone-to-milestone and have no runway to endure a “lockbox” period.
Grantees don’t need a “lockbox” to be incentivized:
ZCG grantees are already (and were always) accountable for their milestones and subject to scrutiny from the committee and the community. They don’t need to be “lockboxed” into better “alignment” or to have “better incentives”. They are already aligned with the projects they proposed and the community supported as necessary. Also, every granted proposal is “lockboxed” already. Unless they can convince ZCG to hand a substantial initial funding request, it’s very simple: no milestone, no funds.
Grants with no upfront payment are just “milestone retroactive”
There has been an appraisal on “retroactive grants” and “lending”. People that haven’t applied to grants don’t need to know it but, essentially, grants that don’t ask for “Initial payments” are basically “Retroactive” grants but on a milestone basis. ZCG won’t approve a payment of a milestone that can’t be proved to have been delivered. So there is not the case that grantees can sit down on milestone funds because they always get paid after delivering the milestone (unless they had overpriced the grant).
Mitigating Regulatory Risks: The Financial Privacy Foundation (FPF) is a non-profit organization incorporated and based in the Cayman Islands. By minimizing direct funding of US-based organizations, this proposal helps to reduce potential regulatory scrutiny and legal risks.
Nowadays, any grantee is subject to US Sanctions restrictions. This means that whenever someone KYCs with the Zcash Foundation to be eligible to ZCG grant payment, they need to be “clean” from the PoV of US Sanctions and Embargos. This entails that many people affected by this sanctions will either need to secretly use unsanctioned intermediaries (and probably be in contradiction with US Law if caught) or abstain from engaging in community grants.
According to the aggregation of the alternative dev fund sentiment polls, the community sentiment was highly interested in ZCG independence (81% in favor). I think that this is a good start towards that path. It’s something that can be done while the NDFM development takes place. More so, a non-us-based ZCG will be able to attract other contributors that until now were literally sanctioned and left out of being part of the community of Zcash grantees.
Other remarks
I disagree. Grants have a purpose and scope and, by their nature, are inherently aligned with community interests. Given than grantees don’t have a “runway” of funds at their disposal “while the system is built” then what the outcome for them is doubly uncertain because: (a) grantees don’t have money runways; (b) they don’t have a guarantee that once the NDFM is created, if they make it, they will be granted any funds. ZF and ECC do have runways and clear incentives to release the lockbox, because it is highly probable that they will be granted funds since they are the main developers of the system.
Counter example: Zcash Ecosystem Security Lead is a grant that renews every 3 months. Given that the grantee is a highly respected firm with probably lots of other projects and a for-profit nature. What makes you think that if they grant funds are lockboxed they will stick continue to contribute to the funding mechanism?
Will the lockbox be removed before or after the NDFM code is audited? Who will pay for the audit then?
I agree with the “impartial” argument, but I believe it is incorrect to call it “fair”, given that funds being lockboxed would not affect ZF, ECC and ZCG the same way.
I think you have a good point here. Given that ZCG had to pull the hand brake on most recent QEDIT’s grant they had approved, it is reasonable that its processes are revised for certain kind of grants or all of them. Although, it is fair to say that ZSAs had shown great community support and mostly the Stablecoin demand was at the time of approval rather high (and probably overrepresented). Finally ZURE surveys showed little demand for ZSAs in contrast from what it could be appreciated from the forum posts.
PS: Although it is public information, I shall remind the reader that ZWCD 2024 had originally requested funds for 12 monthly milestones, but was only granted 3 months with subsequent “renewals” upon repeatedly creating new grant request due to low coin price and low budget. This affected the possibility to plan larger and more useful developments and had to be restructured to accommodate to the market conditions and the alleged ZCG treasury constraints. ZWCD 2024 has no runway whatsoever unless ZCG decides otherwise.
PS2: I should have been drafting my 2024 Q3 grant request, but instead I wall-texted this post.
PS3: in case it is not clear, when I’m saying “grantees don’t have a runway”, I’m referring mostly to grantees that are not companies / organizations. It can be the case that these orgs do have a runway. But given that (unlike ECC or ZF) they are not 100% dedicated to Zcash that they might decide they can’t make use of their own resources to keep working on Zcash while the NDFM is built.
I just want to add that I recently joined the ZecHub DAO because I think it can become the place where the Zcash community can come together to discuss and vote on issues, like the run-off poll.
Instead of having multiple polls run in parallel, I think asking people to join the DAO to vote is not a big hurdle, especially for a consequential decision like this run-off.
It sounds to me like you’re assuming something about the mechanism of a future NDFM. But my whole point is that small grantees need to be involved in determining how that mechanism will work. But that aside, there’s an important point I’d like to make:
Anyone, anywhere, could right now propose a mechanism for a new non-direct funding approach. Or, better yet, that person could implement such a mechanism, and if it’s well-designed, be almost certain of obtaining a retroactive grant for that work. What would an NDFM designed by an individual contributor, for individual contributors, look like? I think that folks like the ZCG grantees should be interested in this question, and motivated to figure it out.
Also, I want to point out that there’s no set time period for which the lockbox has to remain locked up. Development on a NDFM could begin today; it could activate at any time.
As a grant recipient, I believe the Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund is the choice that gives the ecosystem the most flexibility on the way to the Non-Direct Funding model.
As pacu explains here, there are parts of the ecosystem that are funded by ZCG that don’t have the runway to keep going if the Dev Fund is unavailable in the lockbox. Also, if something like the lightwalletd infrastructure issue were to happen without a way to fund a response, we would be in trouble.
The ZCG treasury currently holds around 91,000 ZEC, valued at around $2.7 million, and $742,000 USD, totaling approximately $3.4 million. ZCG will continue to accrue ZEC from block rewards until the halving in November, with an expected additional 37,000 ZEC received by the end of the Dev Fund. This amount is significantly less than what ECC and ZF hold in their treasuries.
The Hybrid proposal would allocate 8% of the block reward to ZCG for one year, which amounts to 52,500 ZEC. In contrast, under the Lockbox proposal, ZCG would not receive any additional funding after the halving.
In terms of liabilities, ZCG has a policy of converting approved grant amounts to USD to hedge against fluctuations in the price of ZEC. This helps ensure we can meet our obligations even if the price of ZEC drops significantly, which prevents a situation where we cannot pay grantees or must sell off large amounts of ZEC to cover milestone payments.
Having said that, we do have outstanding future obligations to cover expenses related to Dedicated Resources brought on to support community developers. For example, Least Authority serves as the Ecosystem Security Lead and receives up to $14K per month to perform security audits and consultations.
Additionally, there is an open grant from Chainsafe for $150K to build a browser-compatible library that provides essential primitives for web wallets and browser plugins, which will ultimately be used for a MetaMask Snap. We also anticipate receiving proposals soon from QEDIT for user controls and the asset swap protocol, and from Hanh for the development phase of the coinholder voting mechanism. These proposals will likely total ~$500K.
There’s a lot more work to do, and ZCG should be positioned to bring on independent development teams to further grow and decentralize the Zcash ecosystem. For example, there has been significant protocol development work for ZSAs, but we will also need Zebra and wallets to support shielded assets. Additionally, we need robust hardware wallet support and bridge tooling. Who will do this work?
Furthermore, under both proposals, neither ECC nor ZF receive funding, which means ZCG can potentially step up and assist in helping them execute their roadmaps without delays. In fact, the Hybrid proposal removes the provision that restricts ECC and ZF from applying for grants. So, if necessary, they can apply for ZCG grants.
The main advantage of the Hybrid proposal is that it provides a smooth transition to a grants-based, non-direct funding model. The Lockbox proposal does not.
I think it would be helpful to hear directly from more grant recipients. What do you have planned for 2025, and what amount of funding do you anticipate needing?
Security audits of what? (Sorry to ask an off topic question)
Thanks for the general financial overview. It immediately lead me to ponder if somebody could write a very compelling email to Zooko’s whale friend to ask for a charitable donation of 10-20k ZEC from their massive bag of nearly ~400k ZEC!
Does the ZCG regularly solicit for donations?
Has it ever considered that sort of active type of funds raising?
I don’t follow the logic how you get to this conclusion. How is it possible to conclude that cramming the effort into 1-year vs. 2-year would result in a smoother transition?
I’ve also still never heard an answer to my concerns from long ago.
Are the ECC/ ZCG/ ZF currently re-planning their human resources to be able to actively collaborate on the consensus building, design, and implementation/ deployment of the NDFM (and the lockbox)?
What will the impacts of that sort of reallocation of resources have on existing roadmap deliverables/ estimated schedules?
” vibe and being able generate excitement, growth, adoption and why not (this is a currency folks!) a price rise. Orgs receiving funds from the protocol had their hands and feet tied and mouth duct taped when it came to promoting Zcash during “bull runs”. I’m not a lawyer but it was pretty clear to me that any directly funding org could be accused of “inside trading” if their actions directly affected ZEC’s price in favorable terms to them. Why? because there a DIRECT link (hardcoded public address) between money influx and asset appreciation. It would be too risky to blatantly promote ZEC as other crypto orgs would do with their own coins. So instead of Zcash main Orgs being able to ride the bull runs and create excitement, ZEC Twitter was kind of “Yes!! you go to the moon folks!! And if you get there, we swear that we didn’t have anything to do with it whatsoever! but we are very supportive and happy for you by the way!” not very appealing isn’t it? All of this also had a very high “lawyer up!” budget which was something mentioned by Dodger and Josh during ZconV.
. But in the end grants started flowing, Committee members were finding better resources, tools and experiences. ZCG became a place where Zodlers could be elected to influence the path of the ecosystem through the grants that were approved (or not). We can argue the elections were not fully democratic because ZCAP would be the corpus of people with the ability to vote. Yet, candidates to ZCG would have to “prove their merit” to the general public, win the election and then “prove their real on-the-job contributions to Zcash” if running for a re-election. If we compare it to ZF or ECC, that’s way more public scrutiny and accountability than any “transparency report” could ensure.
as ZWCD creating tools, libraries, fixing bugs, contributing code, testing, hosting dev calls among others.