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.