Hi all! Apologies for the “silence” from ECC. I think this is more to do with us being heads down than a specific plan based on this thread.
We’ve been busy with many things (NU2 and NU3 planning, shielded wallet and exchange adoption, business development efforts in Asia, engaging regulators, etc…) but most relevant for this conversation about funding has been making efforts to improve Zcash governance and preparing The ECC 2019 Q2 Financial Transparency Report.
This is one of the key approaches ECC has been taking to improve governance and multi-stakeholder collaboration. The kind of agreement we’re specifically exploring with the Zcash Foundation would require both organizations to agree on what gets to be called “The Zcash Consensus Protocol”, the “Zcash currency”, and by implication the “ZEC” ticker. This would probably involve some kind of legal agreement that governs the use of the trademark. Both organizations are still exploring that.
If there were any proposed change to funding, like all other consensus rule changes, it would definitely need to go through a Zcash Improvement Proposal process.
I personally would like to get the shared control of the “Zcash” name in place prior to the NU4 Draft ZIP submission deadline, which is August 31, 2019 according to the Network Upgrade Pipeline schedule.
There are several important details about the timeline of NU4:
- First, if anyone proposed a change to any consensus rules (which every funding scheme I’ve noticed in this thread does do) then they must submit that proposal as a ZIP for NU4 (due by August 31st, 2019).
- Second, since NU2 and NU3 have already passed the ZIP draft submission deadline, no new proposals changes can activate before NU4, which should activate in October of 2020.
- Finally, NU4 will activate just as the FR ends. Since proposals like Gareth Davies’s above sounds like it’s supposed to activate at the end of the FR, that suggests they’ll need ZIPs soon.
BTW, another way we’ve been improving collaboration is by collaborating more with the Foundation on the the ZIP selection process. Starting with NU3, the Foundation is performing technical reviews of ZIPs along side the company. Additionally, they are expanding their technical dev team and working on their own full node implementation, which is extremely great news for all Zcash users!