The State of Zcash Governance

The concern is that two people, through their orgs, control what gets built and who gets paid to build it

Then that is outside of the scope of the trademark. The trademark agreement doesn’t give them that power and destroying the agreement as you propose won’t change anything. I mention scams as the reason for an entity or agreement to control it, but obviously that isn’t applicable yet because Zcash isn’t popular enough to have scammers using the name and logo widely.

And as for the devs, good conversation to have, but a different topic.

You talk about needing more voices, more decentralization, and moving away from the 2 org system. I don’t think that can be achieved without giving the development teams more autonomy from the leadership areas of both orgs who have not succeeded in moving Zcash in any direction without fighting. There is a precedent of the core technical teams (as well as non-core technical contributors) setting direction of a cryptocurrency and then as more value is added to the coin more orgs are built to facilitate governance and different areas of the ecosystem. It is crucial that the decisions for what happens next are not only in the forums and there is some way to collect sentiment in addition to the forums (an inquiry about how best to do this in the Zcash R&D Discord would be a good first step).

Lastly, if you want more orgs, there needs to be more support and less conspiracies and hesitation around people trying to do that. I’m not talking about the recent attempts specifically, there has been a history of this.

Summary:

Want more voices? Add more use cases via programmability or radically changing Zcash’d codebase.

Want more orgs? Make one or support others making them.

Want more decentralization? Make a plan that minimizes the power of non-technical leadership who don’t code.

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