Undisclosed and actively relevant conflicts of interest on the Zcash Foundation Board of Directors

Edited on 15th May to add:

After publishing his Medium post, and posting a link to it on Twitter, Zooko subsequently edited the post, removing almost all of it, including the unwarranted and unfounded accusations that it contained.

Fortunately, the Internet Archive captures a snapshot of the original post. It can be found here: Undisclosed and actively relevant conflicts of interest on the Zcash Foundation Board of Directors | by Zooko Wilcox | May, 2022 | Medium


Original post:

I’m just going to share some facts:

  1. We have a conflict of interest policy in place for the Zcash Foundation board.
  2. Matt disclosed his involvement with Sealance to ZF (it’s also listed on his LinkedIn, so not exactly secret). It clearly doesn’t cause any conflict with his role as a member of the ZF’s board. As an aside, I discussed the concept with Matt and Eran back when I was with ECC (I can’t recall exactly when), and I mentioned it to Zooko at the time. He didn’t express any concerns at the time.
  3. Regarding Ian’s involvement with Tezos - this is obviously an historical engagement (i.e. it ended long before I took over as ED of ZF) but Josh Cincinnati has confirmed to me that Ian disclosed his involvement with Tezos at the time. I can also say that Ian disclosed the Tezos involvement to ECC. I seem to recall that, at the time, Zooko was quite excited and positive about the prospect of Sapling being used in Tezos, as he believed it cemented ECC’s reputation as the leading team in this space. (ETA: He even tweeted about it! See third screenshot below.)
  4. A month ago, we communicated to ECC that we’re ready to execute the necessary paperwork to approve NU5.
  5. ECC sent through the paperwork 31 minutes before Zooko posted this topic (see a screenshot of the email below). Unfortunately, they’ve omitted to include Zebra in the list of implementations (second screenshot below) but I’m sure we can get that resolved quickly.

Happy Saturday evening, everybody! :smiley: :beers:


Link to the original tweet: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1210701029743874048

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