Hey everyone,
So, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought over the last month or so. I want to propose an idea should the upcoming development fund be renewed.
I propose that we mandate all dev fund recipients, other than ZCG, to run minor grants and/or bounty programs that further redistribute 1) block rewards to part-time contributors 2) workloads that can be burdensome for dev fund recipients.
Why I propose this
Re bounties
In a recent recording with ZecHub, I explained bounty programs can create more opportunities for people to directly be rewarded for contributions via the dev fund. And, it gives people the opportunity to contribute when they might not have the time to do a minor or major grant.
On the flip side, I believe it helps organizations as well. For example, if ZF has marketing tasks that take a decent amount of time, and they’d rather offload to a part-time contributor, they could create a bounty for $X a week in exchange for Y hours of marketing admin work. This then gives ZF full-time employees to focus on higher level initiatives. It’s a win-win for all parties involved in my opinion.
Re part time projects
If there are more specific initiatives, that teams cannot complete due to bandwidth, orgs can create RFPs that offload the work to the community. This creates more opportunities for community members to apply for Zcash-specific work, and again, it further diversifies the amount of contributors in the community.
If we look at the current Zcash ecosystem, we have a few examples where this is successful:
@thedesertlynx’s podcast is $500 an episode
@ZecHub’s newsletter goes out 4x a month at a cost of 2 ZEC/$70 USD a month
And more!
Tl;dr, I think giving more people an opportunity to contribute further redistributes the supply of Zcash in a more optimal way (i.e. everyone just isn’t dumping it), and establishes a contributor community whose focus isn’t on price appreciation. And, the quality of work can still be really high!
How this works in practice
Say we have three dev-fund recipients outside of ZCG in the next dev fund. I propose that those three organizations publicly propose what their objectives are to the community. They outline what staff they need for said objectives and staff accordingly.
Should they need additional support, but can’t justify full-time hires or external contractors, they create bounties and/or RFPs that are designated for members of the Zcash and/or broader crypto community to apply and/or complete.
Community members scan the bounty opportunities, submit proposals and/or work, and are rewarded with bounties appropriately.
It’s a lot to manage, but it’s pretty simple in practice!
If orgs don’t want to manage such a process, we could possibly do two other things.
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create non-profits, who receive a very small portion of the dev fund, that are responsible for managing bounty programs for dev fund recipients who need to offload some tasks to the community. I kinda like this.
-
expand and give ZCG the ability to source RFPs from dev fund orgs and manage bounty programs on their behalf. I don’t like this.
I think 1 is better than 2 because ZCG is already stretched thin and I believe they should focus on major grants, as they are doing. I only kinda like 1 because it gives single entities a lot of control, but I think in practice it would be fair.
To finish
I believe that by creating more contribution opportunities, future dev fund recipients can offload work to the community to get back some bandwidth. I also believe it creates stronger (and less-speculative) incentives for community members who want to acquire ZEC. I believe these models can give ZEC more utility as a token.
If more people earn ZEC, versus buying it on an exchange, they may view the token as a payment for their services instead of an investment. It changes ZEC from an investment asset to money.
Let’s get more people earning Zcash via the dev fund and contributing to the ecosystem. Then we have more people, with more ZEC, to stimulate the Zeconomy.
Lmk what you think! Please be nice!
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