Check out this cool graph that Anthropic Fable 5 just generated for me based on Zcash Foundation and Financial Privacy Foundation’s transparency reports that they posted to their blogs:
So there is currently about $40M sitting in the ZCG treasury, and if the Zcash price stays about the same for the coming year, they’ll receive something on the order of $24M more over the next year. In contrast, until Q4 of last year, ZCG had less than $7m total in its treasury and was spending around $1m per quarter, max.
Here are a few ideas of possible answers to my question above—just to widen the Overton window and stimulate discussion. I am totally not intending to take responsibility for any of these possibilities. That’s a huge, difficult, heavy-responsibility job, and one that most of us have never done before, and I’m just tossing this out here just to get some creative juices flowing, and to get them flowing in public.
- Steady as she goes: Keep giving out grants adding up to about $1m to $2m per quarter. That’s what we know we can do successfully. Anything else is a gamble. What happens to the rest of the money that doesn’t get given out? It swells the treasury to hand over to the next generation of ZCG.
- Scale up: Start giving out many more grants, and/or larger grants. Do more good sooner with the money.
- Big Grants: Find a major project or two that you can be confident will be well-managed, and have a good chance of producing outsized benefits for all Zcashers, and requires multiple millions or tens of millions of dollars worth of donation to pull it off. Some kind of major partnership for Zcash? Some kind of… I dunno. Be creative? Ask an AI? Call for proposals and then use an AI to filter out the torrent of resulting AI-generated bullshit?
- Launch some kind of spin-off. Is there some other group, some other structure, some other decision-maker who could make good use of this much money in a way that you couldn’t? If so, and if you can find them and be sure that they would make better use of the money in the service of all Zcash, you should do that instead of leaving it sitting idly in the treasury.
- Lock it up! Do we want tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ZEC sitting in a wallet controlled by the Financial Privacy Foundation? What if instead we, uh, somehow created a time-locked transaction or some kind of “lockbox” type thingie and put it in there, so that we would all be sure that it couldn’t be accessed for a certain time, like 1 year, or 5 years, or 10 years, or something.
- Put it to work! I noticed that a little bit of ZCG treasury money is already in an LP position in Maya. Maybe a lot should be?! (Maybe not!?) Maybe there are other similar “productive capital” kinds of things we could do with it?
- Donate it to the Zcash Sustainability Mechanism! This is kind of like the “locking it up” option above, except that it gets incrementally paid out in the future in issuance to miners and Dev Fund (including ZCG’s portion of Dev Fund). I actually like this one, and would actually advocate for a small experiment along these lines, like donate 1000 ZEC to the Zcash Sustainability Mechanism immediately. The reason would be to increase Zcash’s sustainability in the long-term and to reduce the supply of ZEC in the short term. The more you donate to NSM the bigger those two effects are!
- Your Idea Here. I think this is an unprecedented situation and we’re very fortunate to be in it thanks to all the ZEC holders and supporters, but from what I’ve learned, it is also very tricky to manage such a situation well, and I’m grateful to everyone who is spending their time and committing their reputation to this.
Hm. And you know what? Maybe ZCG committee members and candidates are not the ones to making these decisions. It’s like, their job is to give out grants. It’s the community as a whole’s job to decide if we’re allocating too much or too little to that function versus other uses of that money.
Maybe someone (not me!) should write a ZIP proposing a structural change to the entire Dev Fund. (I will always advocate to keep the Dev Fund in some form—it is a long-term strategic advantage to Zcash that helps make Zcash sustainable and makes Zcash development more aligned with ZEC holders. BTW neither I nor Shielded Labs accept any money from the Dev Fund—only from Zcash holders and supporters who donate to Shielded Labs.)
But, I’m very interested in how ZCG committee candidates would think about the huge “problem”/opportunity they are facing that they are being given way more money by the ZEC holders than they’ve ever deployed before. 
So this is still my question for the candidates.