Just to drop my 2¢ here – coming from the perspective of projects I work on (Anoma and Namada) which do not directly use ZEC (yet) but which do benefit from a lot of the technology developed by the Zcash community and funded by ZEC holders – one aspect of the NSM that really excites me is the (future) potential for other networks and assets to contribute to the NSM, providing both:
- A credibly neutral mechanism to fund the roles (e.g. stakers) and objectives (e.g. development) that the Zcash community considers to be valuable and worth funding (which the community demonstrates by adopting a version of the Zcash software with a particular set of NSM minting recipients), and
- Incentive-alignment (Zcash users/stakers/etc. benefit from those networks doing well).
The nature of these benefits – or why one might want them – might not be so obvious, so let me motivate them a bit.
First, a credibly neutral funding mechanism. From my perspective, one of the main barriers preventing another network, community, or asset from supporting Zcash is the lack of an available way to do so which respects the decisions (particularly those about what to fund) made by the Zcash community. For example, were Namada to just donate NAM to specific organizations (which, in a sense, we have done with the RPGF program), those organizations would benefit, but other organizations that the Zcash community considers valuable might not – and if donations were sizeable (not likely in this case, but perhaps with other networks and over time), the distribution of organizations within the Zcash ecosystem might be influenced (e.g. organizations might start to change what they do in order to seek future external donations/funding). In my opinion, this influence is not desirable – I want Namada to support Zcash as a whole, in recompense and recognition for the productive outputs of Zcash as a whole (such as the research, technology, ecosystem, etc.), in a way which simply defers to the self-understanding of the Zcash community as to how resources should be internally distributed. Donations of NAM (or other assets) to the NSM offer such a credibly neutral mechanism.
Second, incentive alignment. Donating another asset to the NSM means that members of the Zcash ecosystem – particularly current or future recipients of NSM minting, but also anyone who benefits from the services provided and work performed by those recipients – also benefit from the other asset (and network) doing well. This gives members of both ecosystems an additional reason to collaborate and work together. Speculating a bit, one could even imagine a future world of multiple NSMs on multiple networks, all contributing different amounts to each other: a kind of mutualist economic support system which respects the governance decisions of each ecosystem participant. That’s a future I could get excited about!