Future of Zcash

[GGuy]

Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with much of what you said. I’m supportive of a continuation of the dev fund, more recipients, and more features/instruments.

But I think there are a few questions we need to ask ourselves as a community.

Is a continuation of the 20% dev fund enough?

Undoubtedly no. Especially if we want to continue innovating not only with more features but also core work like scalability.

@GGuy

For lack of a better value I’ve started at $30 with an increase in ZEC price of 30% per year.

+------+-------------------+--------------------+------------------+------------------------+--------------+
| Year | Total ZEC Reward  | Miner ZEC Reward   | Dev Fund ZEC     | Projected ZECUSD Price | Dev Fund USD |
+------+-------------------+--------------------+------------------+------------------------+--------------+
| 2024 | 1244107.5         | 995286             | 248821.5         | $30                    | $7,464,645   |
| 2025 | 655948.8          | 524759.04          | 131189.76        | $39                    | $5,116,400   |
| 2026 | 655948.8          | 524759.04          | 131189.76        | $50.7                  | $6,651,320   |
| 2027 | 655948.8          | 524759.04          | 131189.76        | $65.91                 | $8,646,717   |
| 2028 | 584368.2208       | 524759.04          | 116873.64416     | $85.683                | $10,014,084  |
+------+-------------------+--------------------+------------------+------------------------+--------------+
|                                                                                     Total | $37,893,166  |

That’s not even enough to fund ECC and ZF let alone ZCG. If we truely want any sort of innovation I believe we need to increase the dev fund.

We want a smarter Zcash, but to what end, and for which users?

I personally believe the smart contract movement has shown some patterns around what contracts they want… 2 of the main ones are financial instruments, and governance instruments. I don’t think my specific predictions will be helpful to anyone, but I believe if we take note of early trends like these we can better target Zcash for the users of today, and tomorrow.

Who/how/what/when should we build a smarter Zcash?

Personally I think we should build for the users stated above. Those who need financial instruments, and those who need governance instruments. I haven’t looked myself but a huge portion of contract development must be a subset of the well known financial and governance instruments.

For example, if we look at finance specifically we can see many features built out with smart contracts.

• Options
• Collateral, Lending, and Borrowing
• Insurance
• Derivatives
• Stablecoins
• Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs)
• Asset Management

So there are of course 2 ways to achieve these feature. Programmable smart contracts, or implement specific and targeted Zcash financial instruments. I’m going to look at the second.

I hope many of us already assume implementing specific instruments is a good idea. We funded QEDIT to do this very thing with atomic swaps! I haven’t quite got my head around their high level description but it does appear, in terms of financial instruments listed above, they are thinking about (on-chain) locked collateral against an option a recipient can execute. It’s not yet clear to me how QEDIT intend to implement this and if users will have access to these low level locking and option features .

For example, could we, in the future, allow for large time locks and options that allow for long term hedging/investment opportunities? How cool would that be ?!?! What about conditional options so there can be native Zcash insurance providers ?!?! What about synthetics (think makerDAO) that allow users to claim the underlying collateral ?!?!

Anyways, that’s my dream . Who’s ready to dream with me?