Jason McGee for ZCG (December 2024)

[aquietinvestor]

I’m excited to announce that I am running for re-election to the Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) committee in 2025. Over the past three years I’ve been on the committee, ZCG has contributed significantly to decentralizing the Zcash ecosystem by supporting independent teams and funding initiatives that have strengthened the protocol and the broader community. This work has made the Zcash ecosystem larger, stronger, and more diverse. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved and look forward to building on this progress to help Zcash continue to grow and succeed.

While I have new responsibilities at Shielded Labs, I am confident I can handle both roles simultaneously. I tracked my ZCG hours in 2024 and work 20-25 hours per month, which averages out to about an hour a day. I believe it is valuable to have someone who is “full-time Zcash” serving on the committee—someone who is available to keep an eye on the program, attend Arborist and other community calls, and liaise with current and prospective grantees. I’m happy to fill that role.

Some of my favorite grants and notable accomplishments from the past year:

• Coinholder Voting: ZCG prioritized the development of a shielded coinholder voting mechanism. Hanh quickly produced a prototype that was used during the Dev Fund discussions, where one poll recorded nearly 500,000 ZEC in votes with the results aligning with other community sentiment polls. While the mechanism is still being refined, it provides coinholders with a way to participate in governance and express their views on important topics. In the future, it will be possible to integrate the mechanism into other wallets, and anyone will be able to run their own polls.

• ZecHub’s Growth: ZecHub matured significantly over the past few years, evolving from a passion project into Zcash’s leading platform for education and community engagement. The DAO now has 20 active members who regularly participate in governance initiatives. The bounty program has expanded and become more decentralized, and ZecHub has launched its own Global Ambassador Program to further grow the community. It’s also impressive to see how effectively they collaborate with other community groups, including Zcash Brazil, Zcash Espanol, and the ZK AV Club.

• Increased Collaboration: ZCG focused on strengthening collaboration with other Zcash organizations by allocating resources to help them meet their objectives. For example, we funded the Zingo! team to support ECC and ZF with zcashd deprecation work and brought on Pacu to assist with coordination. These initiatives have been successful so far. Additionally, we provided funding to Keystone to integrate shielded ZEC into their hardware wallet solution. The Keystone team has worked incredibly well with ECC engineers and made significant progress on their milestones. I look forward to ZCG supporting more collaborative efforts in 2025.

• Maya Protocol: After years of stalled progress on the Thorchain integration, ZCG decided to cancel that grant and fund Hanh to integrate transparent and shielded ZEC with the Maya Protocol. This integration is significant because DEX support allows users to trade ZEC without relying on centralized exchanges, which is especially important in the current regulatory environment. Additionally, DEX support creates new opportunities for Zcash within DeFi. Hanh has made excellent progress, and the integration is on track to be completed by Q1 2025.

• Treasury Management: In 2024, we made difficult but necessary adjustments to navigate the bear market. We were more selective with grant approvals, negotiated grant terms to reduce costs, canceled underperforming grants, and scaled back certain programs, including the Global Ambassador Program. These measures were essential to ensure ZCG’s long-term financial stability and its ability to fund large and impactful development projects. Additionally, I co-proposed and strongly advocated for the Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund, which allocates 12% of the Dev Fund to a lockbox and 8% to ZCG for one year. This provides ZCG with an additional 52,500 ZEC to support independent development initiatives and community programs.

Here’s what I hope to accomplish in 2025:

• Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs): I’m excited about the upcoming implementation of ZSAs in NU7 in mid-2025. To prepare for the launch, it’s important that ZCG engage with potential issuers ahead of time so that assets will be ready to trade on the ZSA protocol. I will work closely with ZCG and Qedit on outreach efforts to attract issuers. I’ve already initiated discussions with Membrane Finance about a EUROe stablecoin and am currently working on organizing a call between ZCG, Paxos, and Qedit. Paxos has a partnership with PayPal (PYUSD) and offers assets such as a USD stablecoin (USDP) and digital gold (PAXG). I will continue engaging with other potential issuers who are well-suited to become early adopters of ZSAs.

• Community Projects: Over the past three years, I have supported grants focused on community growth and engagement, and I plan to continue supporting these efforts in 2025. As we approach the next bull market, it is crucial to allocate a portion of ZCG’s treasury to initiatives that strengthen community, bring in new members, and support emerging groups. As I mentioned above, I’ve been impressed with ZecHub, Zcash Brazil, Zcash Español, and the ZK AV Club, and I look forward to seeing them continue to grow next year. I also hope to see new communities emerge in regions with significant crypto adoption and where Zcash has strong potential use cases. Additionally, I think ZCG should either reinstate the Global Ambassador Program or provide ZecHub with the resources and support to take it over.

• Transition to FPF: ZCG is transitioning from being administered by the Zcash Foundation to becoming an independent committee under FPF, an organization based in the Cayman Islands. This transition represents an important step toward achieving greater geographic decentralization and increasing ZCG’s independence and autonomy. I will work closely with Alex, Danika, and ZCG to ensure the transition is smooth and there is minimal disruption to the grant process. The Zcash Foundation has provided outstanding support over the past few years, and I am confident that FPF will deliver the same high level of support for ZCG.

• Hedging Strategy: Managing a treasury in a volatile asset is incredibly challenging. While I believe we navigated the bear market effectively last year, it’s crucial to prepare for the next bull cycle by learning from past mistakes and hedging upside volatility. This means taking profits and locking in gains to ensure the long-term stability of ZCG’s treasury, which will enable continued support for independent development initiatives and community projects. I will work with FPF to develop a hedging strategy that mitigates market risk and ensures ZCG has the resources needed to fulfill its mission.

• More Experimentation: ZCG is a relatively new program and has significant opportunities for growth and improvement. I’d like to see ZCG explore occasional experiments to improve the grants process. One idea is to introduce quarterly grant rounds for specific types of proposals, which could streamline the review process and allow more time for proactive outreach. Additionally, I’d like to explore alternative methods for gauging community sentiment on grants, such as using Helios polls targeting key community members or the ZecHub DAO. Amber also proposed experimenting with a small grants pool allocated directly by coinholders, which could be a valuable initiative as the coinholder mechanism evolves and matures.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my candidacy over the past three years. Serving on the committee has been a rewarding experience. I enjoy working with fellow committee members, as well as current and prospective grantees, to drive meaningful progress for Zcash. I’m also grateful to the Zcash Foundation and FPF for providing excellent support. I look forward to continuing this work and would be honored to contribute to the committee again in 2025.

Thank you,

Jason McGee

[highlow]

Hi,
Can you be more specific on the part of Hedging Strategy ?

As we can see now the ZCG has in it’s hands more than 50k ZCASH…please explain to the community, as clear as you can, how ZCG will manage the Hedging Strategy having over 50k ZEC to play with. Please explain the mechanisms that can be applied on zcash price like:

-Is ZCG allowed to dump again the market to 20usd?

-Are they going to sell all 50k zcash as price goes up on this bull market opportunity you describe thus preventing the price of zcash to rise again?
-The part of taking profits that you are talking about in your description…means…crushing the zec / btc price pair again just to have a small growth on zec/usd pair? and in all this time you’ll end up as investor with less BTC invested in ZCASH?

-In your answer please advise and show how the zcash/btc will evolve because investors allover the world see that zcash valued 3BTC when it was created…and ended now as 0.000598 BTC price for 1 zcash.

-Are we going to have the same perpetual history of zcash strategy since zcash was created? meaning lower values of zcash btc pair? or somehow you are going to stop this theft behaviour of the zcash market?

-why ZCG was credited with zcash and not with us dollars? shouldn’t investment come from investors in usd form ? not allowing ZCF to crush the market? after all where is the money from the last zcash bearish crush?

-by crediting ZCG with zcash they can dump the spot the price as they please and gain tremendous amounts in margins market and destroying the spot price thus ending the life of zcash as people wants it and destroying miner’s revenue. the spot price must be encouraged not diluted.

People shouldn’t agree with this granting for ZCG with ZCASH.
Granting ZCG with USD from investors or from last bearish market would be a winning solution for miners and holders. Granting ZCG with physical assets is a dangerous game that you play. We don’t have control of what ZCF will do over zcash spot price. By having such a number of zcash I guess a big dump will come again over spot. It is like a gangster company that only takes from people.

Thank you,
Your always, zcash supporter

[aquietinvestor]

Hi @highlow. Thank you for raising these thoughtful questions and concerns.

I want to clarify that my hedging strategy would not seek to dump ZEC on the market or take actions that would unnecessarily drive the price down. The hedging strategy I envision involves carefully timing any sales to align with market conditions. In a bull market, there is typically greater demand and liquidity, which can absorb ZEC sales without causing significant price impacts. Conversely, in a bear market, liquidity tends to dry up, and selling large amounts of ZEC would be counterproductive both to the market and ZCG’s long-term financing goals.

Ideally, during bear markets, ZCG could use its USD reserves to fund grants and buy back ZEC at lower prices during periods of reduced demand. This could potentially absorb some of the market pressure that drives the price to extremely low levels in bear market conditions. Overall, the approach would aim to balance market dynamics and ensure ZCG’s ability to have the financing necessary to support long-term development and community initiatives.

I hope this answers your questions. If not, I’m happy to chat more.

Thanks!

[artkor]

Jason, thank you and all the ZCG participants for this great work.

The questions that @highlow asked are really valid and I absolutely believe that the topic of hedging, as well as regulating the flow of community costs for implement improvements, should be tied to market cycles as much as possible. I just want to draw @highlow’s attention to some significant changes.

The Lockbox idea as far as I can tell has been widely supported by the community and this allows everyone to be assured that the Dev Fund is transparently NOT being spent today, but is being accumulated for at least during the following year. It receives 216 coins daily and is 12% of the total dev fund. The current ZCG budget is as deficit as possible. In relative terms, given that ZCG is now funding every possible team, including key ECC and ZF activities that we cannot afford to give up, then there has been a 5x budget cut. Halving has halved the award, and LockBox receives 60% of all development fund contributions. The remaining 8% is unlikely to have a significant impact on the price, because including halving it’s 144 coins per day. Multiply that by the current ZEC price and you’ll get an idea of how much we’re cutting back on spending today. Therefore, ZCG is also interested in a SIGNIFICANT increase in the price of ZEC to be able to fund any additional projects beyond the mandatory ones. At the same time, nobody can’t stop miners from selling, but ZCG is definitely not a key seller now, if I may put it that way.

Something else important. The new Shielded Labs division where Jason is ED is completely focused on implementing CrossLink (i.e. moving to PoS, speaking of sellers). And much to the delight of us all, Shielded Labs is fully funded by donations of personal funds from some influential and respected people in the crypto community who believe in the mission of Zcash. I’m sure that SL also has a huge focus on long term stabilisation of not only the price but also the sustainability of Zcash as a system and the proposed Network Sustainability Mechanism is also positively received by the community. I’ll just briefly say that its introduction has the potential to increase the current deficit of ZEC, which will also have a positive impact on the price.

All this gives me personally a lot of confidence that a repeat of the deplorable situation of 2022-2024 will not happen again. We all learn from past events and everyone here realises that some mistakes have been made. It is all the more important to have people in ZCG with experience.

I definitely encourage everyone to support Jason in the ZCG.