Then why shut down the ZCG? Why not restructure it? You’ve been writing ZIPs for decades, one would think you can do a perfect bureaucratic structure in yet another ZIP.
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Personally, I agree with you. The ZCG does not need 150 M USD, and as a matter of fact its spending hasn’t changed much. But the OG proposal goes further and dissolves the ZCG itself.
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Sean - I hold you in high regard but can we try to temper the tone of this thread a bit?
The communication styles above only stoke the drama, I really don’t think speaking in this way is productive.
The first that I found out about all of this was when this thread opened. I do my best to never use X. I think the vast majority of the Zcash community, and actual coinholders (by count, not by volume of ZEC held), also have no idea about it.
Arguing with ZCG members is not getting us anywhere.
Personally, if ZCG members did ANYTHING to reduce the community’s available money, without community approval, I would be furious. I would actually litigate.
Thinking on this for way more than one month is appropriate, and I got the first chance to think about this two days ago.
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can we try to temper the tone of this thread a bit?
I came in here completely neutral. Read the posts I was replying to:
We all have to stick our necks out to criticize ZCG here and elsewhere, and subject ourselves to accusations of bias and ulterior motives. We spent a month trying to avoid this—staying silent to allow them to set the terms of the discussion and propose what to do with the treasury, to avoid unnecessary conflict in the community.
If I’m upset it’s because I tried everything to be accommodating to ZCG here, and it’s like it doesn’t matter to them at all. People on the panel itself are speculating about our real motivations and casting us as sinister actors.
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Exactly! Does ZCG even have that kind of authority? This should have started with a calm, public discussion from the very beginning. But now, a whole aura has already formed around the issue, as if five impostors had taken over the community’s vault. That’s really discouraging.
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ZCG gets 2 weeks to decide if they want to allocate $5,000 to a random dev. Just 4 weeks to decide THIS? Not to mention ZIPs like NU7 get years of leeway, ZIP 1016 itself was thought over for several months.
Why the urgency?
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ZCG was asked to propose to the community what they thought could and should be done with the treasury that they privately agreed was out of control due to the rapid increase in ZEC price. They weren’t asked to decide anything, not least where the funds were supposed to go instead.
I wrote this in detail above.
Why the urgency?
Again, answered above. Their treasury accumulates millions more each week, and the price continues to increase.
@GGuy told me ZCG would be proposing something back in September.
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Then the ZCG can simply voluntarily pledge to hold any new ZEC from this point on until a decision is made, and abiding by the decision, distribute it to the NSM if such a decision were to be made, or the funds stay with the ZCG otherwise. That’s an obvious choice here, is it not?
Wait, so you already wrote the proposal they were suppose to give to the community? In which case, why didn’t you and the others introduce it yourself? Unless… it had elements the ZCG had to decide… inconceivable!
I apologize for my English, Sean. I don’t know how you interpreted it, but what I meant to say was that I don’t want to annoy you with these conversations.
And why are you talking about hidden motives? I didn’t say that. The motives of the whales, whom I respect greatly, are completely transparent and clear to me.
If I were one of them, I’d also want to get rid of unpredictable factors, such as those five guys over whom I have no influence. I definitely wouldn’t have left it like that. And that’s why I’m well aware that we need to reduce the risks somewhere so that everyone feels comfortable. By the way, in the interest of transparency, I’ll say right away that, no matter what, I don’t plan to run for reelection to the ZCG for the next term. So my motives here are absolutely pure.
I also completely agree with the argument that ZCG will never be able to handle these volumes. That’s obvious.
I think the low approval rate is because the bar for accepting proposals is very high. Does anyone want it to be the other way around? It’s clear that there will always be disagreements over major proposals, but we carefully read the comments in every thread for each proposal. I haven’t seen any protests regarding the proposals that have suddenly become problematic today.
IMO the ZCG should instead be restructured similar to how the Ethereum Foundation grants (used to) work, with sub-committees and grant tracks. That way we get rid of the (metaphorical) 6 idiots and everyone’s happy with more bureaucracy.
While we’re at it, why don’t we structure it as a formal 501(c)(3) similar to ZF?
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Several people wanted to propose it, publicly, to the community back then. But there was an existing campaign against the dev fund and the issues were likely to be conflated. ZCG themselves agreed this particular element of the debate was a problem, and even floated their own solutions privately such as a USD-denominated cap on the fund size which returned excess to the NSM.
So it was only natural that they should propose the solution(s) that they were comfortable with, to avoid that issue being dragged into the larger debate about ZCG itself. But in any case, I was told that this was their intention and they did not do it.
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Yes, yes, yes. This is our chance to really scale. We can actually get Zcash out into the world with significant marketing, bounties, events, and full time hires.
We can play on the same level as Ethereum, Solana, huge foundations.
Hire experienced nonprofit leadership and deploy the capital after making a ten year treasury plan.
Separate granting decisions from treasury decisions.
Don’t throw the money away to the miners who opened this topic. Do great things for the community, finally.
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Not just that. I want to remind the community of… this.
Eran Tromer (THE Eran Tromer) and Zeyu Liu needed to be funded to research oblivious message retrieval at Columbia. Columbia returned the wire. I guess a wire from the Caymans is not very well received.
With a formal trust structure as a nonprofit, ZCG can finally directly fund studies in universities, which are due to boost lobbying efforts indirectly as well because neutral research lands very well with bureaucrats (@paulbrigner care to opine?), and it mimicks the well known structure Monero used to establish credibility with American higher education (MAGIC Grants)
Further, it will also establish the name of Zcash in major universities like NYU Courant and CMU, which leads to increased grassroots development for Zcash. Currently, major conferences like Financial Cryptography only mostly receive research related to more… receptive tokens such as Starknet, but not Zcash, because no incentive to.
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Advocating for putting all this money in a non-profit foundation is clearest sign that you are indeed a Fed.
A much more useful idea would be to burn all this ZEC forever.
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This is the toxic energy our community must reject.
Everyone pay attention: it’s coming from coinholders. (edit: large coinholders)
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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!
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We’re all coin holders here in one way or another. I actually consider myself more of a coin holder.
The problem is that the numerical majority has been deprived of the right to express their opinion because the numerical minority holds millions of coins.
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Would a committee of the say the top 5-10 Zcash coin-holders that so choose to reveal their holdings (perhaps using voting circuit) forming a new ZCG to vote on grants make everyone happy in this discussion?
My god no that is literally the whale oligarchy problem that coinholder grants has, but personified.
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