Hello, @Zooko!
Thank you for raising this question. I will try to articulate a broader ZCG view behind this decision, and if other committee members feel it is useful to add their own perspective, I would welcome that.
First, I want to note that this decision was not made quickly. The reason for the rejection is that we did not find sufficient justification that community funds should be used to bootstrap bridge liquidity at this proportions.
I think this is a genuinely difficult question, and there are a few important points worth acknowledging.
ZCG has supported related efforts before. For example, in February 2024 ZCG approved the Transparent & Shielded DEX with Maya Protocol grant, which had a budget of $110,000 and was focused on integration work. That grant was not structured as a liquidity grant. Later, in July 2025, ZCG separately decided to seed $100,000 worth of liquidity into the ZEC pool on Maya Protocol.
Speaking only for myself, I can say that even at that time there was serious discussion within ZCG about whether community funds should be used for liquidity at all. Not everyone on the committee was convinced. One important difference, however, is that with Maya the integration work and the liquidity decision were separated, whereas in this proposal the liquidity component represents the overwhelming majority of the request. In the current WZEC proposal, $70,000 out of $80,000 is allocated to liquidity, market making, and related deployment costs.
I would also add that, in hindsight, the Maya decision was helped by a degree of good fortune that we cannot reasonably expect to repeat. The liquidity was seeded when ZEC was trading at around $40, and soon afterward that same position represented a much larger dollar value as the price appreciated. That does not mean the original concern about using community funds for liquidity was misplaced, but it does mean that the outcome was aided by ZEC appreciating after the liquidity was seeded.
Today it is harder for us to assume that a similar outcome will repeat on a new bridge. Liquidity bootstrapping creates a structural dilemma: nobody wants to be the first person providing liquidity if that means taking the downside of pool mechanics while giving up the upside of holding the asset outright. As a zolder, I understand that concern very well.
That leaves us with a real question: should community funds be used in a way that may effectively subsidize the early risk of a liquidity pool? Our current inclination is that the incentive design of a decentralized bridge should be able to attract voluntary liquidity on its own. If it cannot, then that raises a legitimate question about the sustainability of the model.
For that reason, the current status quo in this ZCG committee is that we are much more comfortable funding infrastructure than funding the pool itself. If the community believes there are strong arguments in favor of community-funded liquidity that we are not sufficiently taking into account, that is something we are open to hearing. But at present, that part of the proposal is where we remain unconvinced.