Are we against the dev fund itself, or against how the current dev fund is run?
Those are two very different questions. Others have raised fair concerns about how ZCG operates. If those concerns are the problem, the fix is governance, not ending the fund.
@joshs, you wrote that it’s “the structure that is the problem,” not the people. I agree, and I’d apply the same lens here. My concern isn’t anyone’s intent. It’s incentives.
1. There aren’t two parties. There are three.
The post frames this as ZCG vs. coinholders. There’s a third party: ZODL, the team that grew out of years of Founders’ Reward and Dev Fund support. That support was a success. It built the team, a product that has found its market, and a $25M seed round.
So ending the fund affects ZODL very differently from teams that haven’t had that support yet. For ZODL, it closes one option among several. For a new team, it can be the only path. The party best placed to propose ending the fund is the one that has benefited most and needs it least, while it competes with teams that still need it. That’s a structural misalignment, whatever anyone intends.
2. ZODL is the continuation of ECC, the largest recipient of dev fund to date
ZODL isn’t a new team that showed up with private funding. It’s largely ECC carrying on under a new name. ZODL have clearly mentioned that “the entire ECC team” moved over as part of the transition. Same people, same product. Here’s what that lineage has received:
- 2016–2020 (Founders’ Reward): ~1.8M ZEC to the company side
- 2020–2024 (Dev Fund, ZIP 1014): 367,500 ZEC to ECC (roughly ~$28M at receipt)
For comparison, the largest ZCG grantee ever received ~$5.8M. That money built Zcash, Zashi, and the SDKs the rest of us build on, and I’m genuinely grateful for it.
3. Built on public funding, then raised on it
ZODL’s $25M+ seed round is a real achievement. But look at what it was raised on. The announcement points to Zashi’s track record, a wallet that “launched” at ECC, 400%+ shielded-pool growth, and $600M in swaps. Every one of those was built between 2020 and 2024, when ECC’s team, its R&D and Zashi itself were paid for by the Dev Fund.
Investors back a team with years of protocol experience, a working codebase and a product that has found its market. Here, the Zcash community paid for all three before any investor showed up. ZODL paid Bootstrap $8M for the IP, and that’s fair. But the raise as it happened wouldn’t have been possible without the dev fund doing the early, risky part.
That’s the fund working exactly as intended, and it deserves credit. It’s also why ending it now matters. You described that role as “speculative funding for ideas that needed incubation.” The next team deserves the same chance to get from idea to something investors will fund.
So unless we believe Zcash has no more ideas that need speculative funding and incubation, there’s still value in a dev fund. The question is how to run it. What we need is a much more transparent and neutral system for pursuing those goals, not the end of the fund.
4. Kicking away the ladder: the pattern
Economists call it kicking away the ladder. I’m not claiming intent. But look at the sequence:
- 2016–2024: Public funding builds the team, Zashi and the MIT wallet SDKs
- Mar 2026: $25M+ raise
- Aug 2026: The ZODL SDK forks and Slipstream move from MIT to AGPL with a commercial license. Third-party App Store distribution now requires permission/license.
- Sep 2026: Development moves to a private main branch and bulk public syncs land only on releases.
- Oct 22, 2026: The MIT SDKs reach end of support at NU7.
Each step is reasonable for a company. Together, they show a direction: from building in public with public money to a commercial stack that other wallets depend on. That’s not a criticism of anyone. It’s where the incentives lead, and it’s why an independent grants path still matters.
Misaligned incentives are a reason to build a more transparent, neutral system for funding it, not to end the fund. Zcash needs more teams competing for users, not fewer. Let’s fix the ladder, not remove it.