Adding some thoughts here, that were lost (and to a tiny audience) earlier in the Zcash Discord. @joshs shared a question along the lines of. How are you confident/ why recommend 2 new organizations that have yet to deliver tangible work to the Zcash project/ protocol layer.
Context here being Shielded Labs, with 3 ongoing network upgrade research initiatives, and Qedit which has past and ongoing ZSA/ asset swap related research and development
In short, I’m of the opinion that these 2 orgs are uniquely qualified to receive this sort of trust from the ecosystem, while I also note some details their respective 1% and 2% block subsidies are intentionally small. Only if ZEC rallies up to $200-500 in the next 4 year cycle, would their %s represent quite over sized funding streams.
At 2% for Qedit the income monthly is about 1000 coins (~35 coins per day, times ~30 days), and Shielded Labs 1% is half of that. With a ZEC baseline of $50 (100% higher than today), that monthly income would be around $50,000 per month for Qedit and $25,000 for Shielded Labs. At today’s ZECprice, those are merely $25,000 and $12,500.
Those incomes line up to be about enough capital to retain 1-5 full time software R&D manager(s) and-or technician(s). I am comfortable with recommending the risk of retaining a handful of new Zcash SMEs, in two organizations extra-ECC/ZF via a new block subsidy.
If ZEC instead held an average value of $500 (rather than $50) over the upcoming 4 year halving cycle, then I’d take the blame for over funding these two new orgs…
My funding recommendations for these orgs is intentionally low because I assume that they would also participate in grants related work over the course of the next 4 years. I’m assuming that in-sync, continuing grants work is how transparency, planning, and accountability would be held against Qedit and SL throughout the 4 year cycle.
Again, I’ll also stress that these recommendations are totally contingent on Jonathan (Qedit) and Jason (Shielded Labs) having full interest/ committment in ironing out the details, accepting the marriage proposal so to speak.
Broadly speaking, what I’m aiming for is 2 new, non-US organizations to be the next Zcash SME hot spots. We all know and love the Foundation and the ECC for their invaluable SME, to begin to distribute globally, my opinion is that a indiscrimate funding stream can help assure participation.
With grants only, it is possible that Qedit or SL ultimately look elsewhere if Zcash headwinds remain strong/ ecosystem sentiment shifts away from ZSAs/ emission smoothening/ ZSF/ ZSF funding economics. It would be sad to have 2 organizations close to breaking the SME inertia point, who then end up going elsewhere (or disbanding).
Welcoming 2 new orgs is a huge wager of trust, I understand that. But given the relatively small economic incentive that I recommend, I hope that the downside risk feels balanced. I’d also like to specifically state that I would be recommending a technical solution here, that could act as a stop gap if circumstances/ sentiment shift significantly.
Zcash Foundation should act in a similar capacity as it does for ZCG today, for Qedit and Shielded Labs, should they accept this model. Meaning, ZF would receive and custody their ZEC, and then use a non-discretionary process of distribution to Qedit/ SL. This would ideally create less address hard-coding into the NU6 upgrade… Again, there is an assumption here of @Dodger willingness to accept this expanding responsibility at the Foundation.
Overall, I like Josh’s proposal a lot, and GGuys, I don’t mind simply letting block rewards expire either (my older first preference), or renewing them exactly how they are… I conceived and presented my proposal because I feel that this ecosystem needed to ask itself the question, what do we think about something similar to today as-is, but broader and with a dash more austerity
To the topic of engineering an ambitious new governance/ grants model, I also love the idea but I’m not convinced that it can be started and completed in the next 18 months (~6 months to halving + 1 year extension). I think that a governance/ grants framework is necessary, but we risk biting off more than we can chew by associating it with hard calendar dates and coin/ treasury economics.
The roadmaps of ECC, ZF, Qedit, SL, are already ambitious enough for the next couple years, without even speculating about the (negative) impact from engineering a new governance/ multi sig grants model along the way as a toss on.