Dear Members of the ZCash Foundation Board and Community,
Today I am resigning from my position on the Zcash Foundation board. Starting today, January 1, 2025, I am the Executive Director at Coin Center, and in dedication to that important role and to avoid any potential conflict of interest, I am resigning from the Foundation and from all other positions paid or unpaid in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Nearly eight years ago I had the unique honor of assisting our tireless board chairman, Andrew Miller, in starting the Zcash Foundation as a public charity dedicated to private payments infrastructure. At the time, our lawyers suggested that the easiest way to get IRS approval of our tax-exempt status was to simply declare our intent to do public education on privacy technologies. I, however, am a bit stubborn, and wanted to be far more explicit about our purpose: we will not just educate the public about these technologies; we will actually build them as a public good.
There was some thinking at the time that the IRS might be so unfamiliar with open source software development and cryptocurrency in general as to reject a submission with such unique charitable purposes spelled out. My response to our lawyers and my fellow board members was that if the IRS wants to deny us the right to build digital public infrastructure as a tax-exempt entity, then we would fight them, and that our victory would be the first of many important steps to make the internet safer, freer, and better.
Although I was admittedly spoiling for a fight, I was thrilled when the IRS approved our charitable status without fuss half a year later. We announced to the world the details of our filing, and I will quote that post at length, taking this moment to remind us all of the purpose we set ourselves to eight years ago:
The IRS has long recognized certain maintainers of public infrastructure as charities. In most cases, however, that infrastructure has been physical: roads, waterworks, parks, and recreational facilities. What makes these things public? They can be used by anyone, a public park accepts all visitors and provides important goods for free to patrons: places for relaxation, contemplation, inspiration, community, and play. In general, we want public charities to help provide these goods because (A) a world of only gated and private parks would be deeply fragmented and non-egalitarian, and (B) government alone can’t always sufficiently provide the quantity and quality of public parks that we might want as a society.
But what if public infrastructure is something that exists in the virtual world rather than the physical? Can a public charity be created to build and maintain these online public spaces?
The Internet is a public space, but it is—especially of late—becoming a balkanized federation of private fiefdoms. Where are you as you wander the Internet? Most likely, you spend the majority of your time on private properties: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Ebay, Reddit, or the New York Times.
Just as the public sewers and subways of New York undergird the very valuable and privately owned buildings above, the public protocols and software stacks of the Internet sustain the very valuable websites we frequent.
Until the emergence of the Bitcoin network, however, there was no public payment infrastructure on the Internet. If you wanted to pay someone else you’d have to use wholly-owned proprietary tubes and channels (the credit card networks, the banks, the Paypals, Wechats, and Venmos of the world).
Bitcoin is awesome, but in its current incarnation, it is not sufficiently private to be a realistic public payments infrastructure. The public deserve privacy as well as ungated, free, and censorship-resistant Internet money. That’s why Zcash and related projects are so important.
In the intervening years, the foundation has, indeed, built. To ensure decentralization and promote extensibility, we re-implemented the entire Zcash client from scratch in the modern programming language Rust. That work became Zebra. Due to the nature of Zcash’s original fork of Bitcoin, this meant we had not only to rebuild the privacy tech of Zcash, but to also rebuild much of the Bitcoin client itself from scratch.
Zebra took longer than expected and much debate has been had over that cost and benefit calculus. I stand by that decision. No cryptocurrency should rely on a single client developed by a single for-profit entity. Nor should we shirk the hard work of rigorously rebuilding core infrastructure using modern tools and languages. If we fail in that task, our critical digital infrastructure will ultimately rot from within.
Could the money we spent building Zebra have gone to other efforts, like marketing or new features, that might have been a greater boon to the price of Zcash? Perhaps, but as many know I have never cared one lick for the short-termism of pumped cryptocurrency prices. It is only good ideas—privacy, strong encryption, censorship resistance—embodied in rigor-demanding, well-written, open source code that will change the world.
I am proud of our work on Zebra and other tools for privacy, including Frost. I am proud that the Zcash Foundation drew top developer talent away from the for-profit internet giants and gave these brilliant folks the opportunity to work on public infrastructure for private payments. I am proud that we pioneered the process of forming a US-based non-profit charity dedicated to digital public goods, and most of all I am proud and humbled to have worked alongside such dedicated and talented professionals.
To my fellow board members and our executive directors for driving that vision, to our administrative and operations directors for cutting through the red tape, and to our incredible developers for doing the hard work of staring at spaghetti code and turning it into something elegant: Thank you all for your hard work and godspeed in your continued endeavors.
My organization, Coin Center, has always been laser focused on defending the work of open source developers from unjust government regulation and prosecution. Though I leave the Zcash Foundation, all of my effort and stubbornness will remain devoted to defending your rights to build. Privacy is normal, and the tools that enable it should be available to all.
Best,
Peter Van Valkenburgh
