Price up, what now for the orgs?

[zkcroc]

With the bull market in full swing and zec 3x off the lows, what does that mean for the org treasuries? Especially since the dev fund tap has been turned off for now and funds are accumulating in the lock box

How are ZF, ECC and ZCG planning to deal with this new found wealth and what is their monetary strategy?
Are they going to sell off or hedge a large portion of their crypto holdings to guarantee more financial runway?
Are they going to keep holding and ride the waves of the bull market?
Bit of both maybe?

There was some controversy stemming from the orgs investing in other crypto start ups and buying BTC and alt coins as a hedge, so personally I don’t want to see that happen further, but selling off some zec into this liquidity and securing cash money seems sensible.

FWIW my bet is the market price moves higher but you never know crypto can be fickle

Care to comment @Dodger @joshs @ZCG

[aquietinvestor]

These are great questions. I posted my views on treasury management and hedging strategy to my ZCG candidacy announcement. Let me know if you have any follow up questions.

@aquietinvestor

Treasury Management: In 2024, we made difficult but necessary adjustments to navigate the bear market. We were more selective with grant approvals, negotiated grant terms to reduce costs, canceled underperforming grants, and scaled back certain programs, including the Global Ambassador Program. These measures were essential to ensure ZCG’s long-term financial stability and its ability to fund large and impactful development projects. Additionally, I co-proposed and strongly advocated for the Hybrid Deferred Dev Fund, which allocates 12% of the Dev Fund to a lockbox and 8% to ZCG for one year. This provides ZCG with an additional 52,500 ZEC to support independent development initiatives and community programs.

@aquietinvestor

Hedging Strategy: Managing a treasury in a volatile asset is incredibly challenging. While I believe we navigated the bear market effectively last year, it’s crucial to prepare for the next bull cycle by learning from past mistakes and hedging upside volatility. This means taking profits and locking in gains to ensure the long-term stability of ZCG’s treasury, which will enable continued support for independent development initiatives and community projects. I will work with FPF to develop a hedging strategy that mitigates market risk and ensures ZCG has the resources needed to fulfill its mission.

[zkcroc]

Thanks for the response Jason,

That is what I expected

The silence from ECC and ZF on the matter probably means they don’t want to talk about their current holdings, when does the next transparency report come out?

[joshs]

I’m happy to talk about it. I’ve just been crazy busy and forgot to respond. Apologies.

As of last week, we had about 4 years of runway at current spend levels. That dropped some over the last couple days. We continue to prioritize the sale of our liquid non-ZEC assets over any ZEC sales. We will also receive a portion of the Namada airdrop but won’t have a handle on what that means until the tokens are available for trade.

We need to increase our spending to add to the core team, a marketing person and have penciled in someone to lead security. We are also prioritizing aggressive delivery over long term preservation while trying to manage our funds responsibly.

Without guaranteed funding, we are exploring options and will spend some time on that in our Jan ZECC summit. We’re working to get our next transparency report out before the end of the month.

[zkcroc]

Thanks, that all sounds reasonable and I look forward to reading the report.

I ask these questions because in my view, over the next 12 months, the orgs have an opportunity to set themselves up to ride out future tough market conditions, and yes selling of non-ZEC assests is a priority over ZEC itself, the more ZEC that can be retained the better for when POS is finally realised.

There were some hard lessons learned over the last bear market and I personally don’t want to see the orgs ZEC reserves or the lockbox plundered during a bear market, its horrible tokenomics

[Dodger]

@cryptomuncher’s question on another topic reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to responding here.

Based on ZF’s assets balances at the end of January, and today’s market prices for ZEC and BTC, ZF holds just over $12.1m worth of assets.

Our current annual budget is $3.75m. Allowing for an annual increase of 15%, our runway lasts 'til the end of Q3 2027.

For context, we tightened our belts in early 2023, and shaved nearly a quarter off our budget (we spent $5.24m in 2023 versus an original budget of $6.88m). We’ve maintained tight fiscal discipline since then, choosing to make Zcon a virtual event, shrinking the team by opting to hold off on replacing folks who’ve left. In 2024, we budgeted $4.4m and spent $3.1m.

I’m really proud of how our team has responded to the challenges we’ve faced. Some teams collapse when the going gets tough. This team knuckled down, focused on what needed to be done, and is delivering better than ever.

We’re about to stage yet another great Zcon, the Dev Summit in Sofia is shaping up really well, FROST is done (tune in later this afternoon if you don’t believe me), and the engineers are heads down, working hard and ticking off everything we need to do to get Zebra ready for zcashd deprecation.

Basically, ZF is a stripped-down, lean, mean machine, firing on all cylinders, and walking the walk.

[HHIROSHIMA]

That all sounds good, but as long as I don’t know how many employees there are at ZF and what each individual costs for which activity in detail, I assume that they still eat up too much money - this also applies to the ECC.

It is unbelievable what this academic or project has cost over the last 8 years and what added value - and by that I mean use cases - it has had to date. For me, it is clearly the smartest and slowest Rugpull of all time. I say it clearly, let all organizations dry up and make sure that you finance yourselves. If you guys had been an employee in a company, your boss would have fired you after 6 months and after 7 months he would have been bankrupt.

[Reformed_Zcash]

@zkcroc

FWIW my bet is the market price moves higher but you never know crypto can be fickle

with ZEC down at 35 area again we’re back to the drawing boards tbh. glad to see orgs thinning down their spending. it seems like there are final steps to defend ZEC price which is to spend down all the USD and altcoins first before tapping ZEC to dollars as last resort. on the lockbox trend im getting ready to put out a dangerous idea… end the lockbox and end the devtax… lets rip this band aid off once and for all instead of plundering another year or two bickering about how to build all these complex rube goldberg machines about how to distribute the next million dollars. lets just leave a bad idea in the rear view mirror right? theres already been too many distractions and missed milestones already around this lockbox safety distribution concept… how about we keep focused on improving zcash protocol and improving ZEC experiences, instead of focusing on how to create a more convoluted way of writing ourselves the same paychecks as always.

too much administrative bloat. lets be done with it.d

[zkcroc]

We had dev fund conversations and polls last year ad nauseum, and there was clear support to keep the funding in some capacity, so please lets not reignite that discussion.

But regardless, its good to see that the ZF balance sheet is healthy, and puts the next few years in good stead.

[cryptomuncher]

So ZF has a stable runway and ECC doesn’t… why not just combine both orgs run it as one lean org and be done with it.

[Reformed_Zcash]

@zkcroc

We had dev fund conversations and polls last year ad nauseum, and there was clear support to keep the funding in some capacity

i read along most of it and whats obvious was that Josh’s proposal was for 1-year and he spent months assuring the community that it was a 1-year only proposal without needing to tack on another entire new round of debates a year later. so what the hell went wrong? we are so far in the gutter that there literally aint enough time on the calendar anymore to do all of this value negative debating and magic money machine delegation building… if these orgs had 1000% more money in their treasuries id be saying a whole other story. but since money is what matters here we gotta deal with the facts time = money… so any time we make the engineers spend on imagining debating and building a gigantic money delegation machine then that is time aka money that otherwise couldve been spent on actually improving Zcash and ZEC experiences.

and btw to munchers point, i 100% support the idea that the orgs should be combined. both orgs could use some DOGE style housekeeping and reduction of double work. lets slash the HR and accounting teams in half if nothing else… between ECC and ZF together theres barely 20 million dollars worth of assets yet for some reason each org is paying some CFO $200,000 a year to crunch the numbers… pointless… combine the orgs and let the best CFO stand. this is just only one example of probably a handful. another obvious bloat zone is taxes and legal… two orgs paying $200,000 for those services could easily get cut in half if pulled all into just one org

[conradoplg]

It may be shocking to learn this, but it takes double the time to do double the work.

Merging orgs won’t magically reduce costs.

Absolutely no one is twiddling their thumbs at ZF or ECC. “DOGE-style” is fantasy thinking whose goal is not to reduce costs but just to sabotage the things you don’t agree with.

[cryptomuncher]

That was not my intention with the original post… here’s hopefully more clarity on what I was getting at…

ZF - currently has the following roles listed as employed

• Exec Director
• Chief Op Officer
• Chief Comm Officer
• Operations Director
• Eng Manager
• 6 Engineers (Core, Crypto, Protocol, Rust)
• Ops & Events Coordinator

As ECC doesn’t share this information on their website, a quick search on LinkedIn coupled with information in various posts from Josh shows

• CEO
• VP of Strategic Alliances
• Director of Finance and Ops
• Business Ops
• Product Manager
• 3 Engineers (Core, Protocol, Crypto)
• Community/Marketing

If you put those lists side by side, there are duplications at the management level. In a combined org, would those still be nenessary?

I’m calling out the elephant in the room because we seem to be back at the same place we were a year ago and nothing has fundamentally changed on adoption.

[conradoplg]

Yes, I understand what you’re saying.

One single manager simply does not have the time to manage teams from both orgs. The same for the other positions.

What you’re suggesting would only make sense if those people where twiddling their thumbs half of their working time, which is not happening.

[HHIROSHIMA]

[cryptomuncher]

21 resources I listed between both orgs

7 resources at Director level or higher - 33% of the total

4 Operations resources

Even combining those together, it’s not a big organization and if you’re suggesting that a 3:1 ratio is good between management vs. non-management roles, then maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the top of the orgs and trim things down.

[Reformed_Zcash]

yep… i mean this feels sad to be beating a dead horse. only dev tax salaried guys are going to be in here defending the absurdity that theres two Zcash orgs with barely 20 software engineers… and yet for some reason theres double of all the management legal admin bloat overhead.

you can throw a dart at the map of america in any major city and find a Jacuzzi business running with 20 staff, 20 million in assets, one CFO, and one CEO… this mess at Zcash can all be blamed on the theatre act they put on to create the appearance of “decentralization” when really all it did was subsidized non-engineer staff bloatification.