Of all the things I can think of that ZCG could spend money funding to help ZCash; giving grants to ECC or ZF is at the bottom of the list. I would rank it somewhere down near burning the ZCG budget each month to reduce supply. Zcash exists as a public good that will outlive ECC/ZF and all of us. At some point on a long timeline, the dev fund will end and the network will live on. If ZCG does its job right we will have hundreds of companies as competent and capable as both the current other recipients.
To be clear: I think the ECC and ZF are both well managed, fiscally conservative and do great work for zcash and the community. Their work and mission is fundamentally different than that of ZCG’s.
The 9% discretionary fund spend is used to fund the Ambassadors and occasionally ZCG members promoting ZCash at conferences. It is not a reflection on grants output or anything relating to funding ecosystem developers. The ZCG has publicly been very conservative in funding the past few quarters. This includes some incredibly difficult conversations with the very wallet developers that rushed to find a solution to the network spam, to ask them to reduce their budgets and road maps this year. All of our grantees have understood the budgetary constraints and are currently working heroics in order to deliver their roadmaps with, in some cases, less than half the funding they needed. The grantees are the front door to the ecosystem, when new users go to a ZCash website, when they download a wallet, when they watch a video or read an article about Zcash; 9 times out of 10 it was funded by ZCG. If we could double our spending and get the grant milestone twice as fast, that is where funding should go. The wallet teams funded by ZCG gave users the options when the network was under attack and let users access their funds. These same wallet teams are now looking at hardware wallet integration and how to onboard the next 1 million zcash users.
Unfortunately the market is not on our side. The grants dashboard is public and hopefully familiar to everyone.
Our big funding grants for ecosystem partners (funding the next ~12 months worth of work) include:
- Nighthawk & ALL public infrastructure (explorer, lightwalletd, etc) - $551k (reduced from $1m)
- Zingo - 375k
- Ywallet + Ledger - $300k
- Zcash Media - $900k
- Free2Z - $333k
- ZecHub $71k
For Comparison, ECC’s transparency report accounts 44% ($337,040) of their monthly budget on development. This was from July-Sept last year so the numbers may be different.
ZCG brings in .25 ZEC per block, 1145 blocks a day. ~8,587 Zec a month which is around $300k a month at today’s prices. Split between the ZF and ECC the money would not even make up for the short fall in the reports.
This funding is not just crucial to the ecosystem, these grantees are the biggest contributors in the ecosystem. Not included in my list are ZSA’s, bridges, community managers, forum moderators, etc who get funding from ZCG.
Removing funding from these projects kills the ZCash.