What? Why? That is one of the worst ideas I have ever seen.
And let me get this straight.
Developers should take funds from Silicon Valley investors via wire transfer through SWIFT, regulated by the United States Government: GOOD
Allowing arbitrary investors to dictate who and what the developers can and cannot work on: GOOD
Being a non-profit foundation responsibly custodying the same funds and being a nonpartisan VC to every new developer, paying out using the very same SWIFT: BAD
Did I get that right, Tom?
Burning the ZCG treasury doesn’t help the network grow or fund independent zero-knowledge research. But it does shrink the aggregate supply, pump token value for dominant holders, and ensure the grassroots developers have zero independent funding—meaning they remain entirely reliant on the VC pockets of Winklevoss Capital and Cypherpunk. Now THAT is a direction to go to, isn’t it, Tom?
For readers: Tom runs one of the VCs I speak of, with his own “Zcash Labs” (check his profile, it’s the main post) bankrolling many developers before coinholders reimburse them. He frames it as generosity, and by extension, if there were any projects this guy wouldn’t like, they don’t get funded!
If there was a ZCG foundation, his arbitrage model stops working, doesn’t it, Tom? The model where you bankroll projects and hope for a return from the coinholder vote.
Disclose conflicts of interest. My god, this entire thread is a massive COI.
References:
Their “funding model”: Upfront funding model | Zcash Labs , which outlines how the company bankrolls projects, then asks coinholders for reimbursement plus a 20% markup.
Billing coinholders for projects in good faith. A literal commission for development. BILLED TO YOU, THE COINHOLDERS. If it was ZSAs, then a cool $1M of the $5M would have went to @thowar2 and his coworkers.
Further, Tom himself stood for ZCG elections in Nov 2025: Tom Howard for ZCG (December 2025) . He still ran on a platform to deprecate ZCG, but replace it with token holder voting, which only stands to further his Zcash Labs model!