Did the old board quit?
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Whenever you guys are ready, I would love to get you on my podcast to get the record straight.
There’s too much disinformation floating around and it’s mostly because the amount of public information is so limited that it makes people speculate.
I can have a debate between Bootstrap and the former ECC dev team. I can have separate conversations with each. What matters is that the market participants receive the right signals and nobody claims that the devs left the project anymore.
My DMs are open!
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Instead of uniting against surveillance, government overreach, and power of large financial institutions, we attack each other and waste resources in these conflicts.
Instead of rejoicing that Zcash/Zashi has been a huge success in terms of price performance and adoption in recent months, greed and power struggles are undermining these successes.
The whole thing feels like an any% speedrun to destroy trust in the community. Wtf.
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The site put up by Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai repeatedly mischaracterizes forking Zashi as a “threat”.
Zashi is an open-source project published under an MIT licence. Forking is a right intentionally granted by that licence to anyone and everyone.
The only thing present in some Zashi builds and not covered by the MIT licence (or licences of dependencies that we judged to be compatible with MIT) are the API keys that identify requests made by the app to the Flexa and NEAR APIs as being made by Zashi. Those keys can be replaced on request to Flexa and NEAR.
It has never been suggested in any discussion I’m aware of, either internally among the former ECC staff or otherwise, that a fork would use any Zashi-specific trademark, branding, or API keys without permission.
The above are objective facts to the best of my knowledge, but this is my opinion: The characterization of forking as a “threat” seems to be indicative of a baseless personal possessiveness that Manian, Garman, Fairless, and Lai feel toward Zashi, an open-source project that they had no significant part in developing. So much for “We are all Zashi”.
I fully endorse what @nuttycom said: we are absolutely committed to supporting Zashi users as far as we’re able, whether that’s continuing development of the app as Zashi or as a fork.
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The new company is formally founded, and its shareholders are well defined. I will not disclose the terms of anyone’s employment or contracting agreement without their explicit consent. I will say that I’m happy with the terms I was offered and I think that they properly reflect the team’s effort and experience.
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Here is the timeline:
- The Zashi release supporting swaps from ZEC was announced on August 28th.
- The Zashi release supporting CrossPay was announced on September 16th.
- The grant proposal was submitted on September 27th (it was obviously drafted earlier).
- The Zashi release supporting swaps to ZEC was announced on October 1st.
- NEAR swap fee revenue ramped up significantly in October.
- The quoted revenue estimate could only be calculated after the end of Q4 2025, i.e. in January.
We could not have relied on that much swap fee revenue at the time of the grant application. In any case, it was a retroactive grant for work already performed by the core and wallet teams before swaps were released. Specifically, the time period of work to be funded stated in the grant application is December 2024 to June 2025, and this is consistent with the “Success metrics” table: it is very clear that it only goes up to the end of Q2 2025 and so does not include swaps.
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Hey everyone, what if history was different?
Imagine: Board accepts promoter and investor deal before deadline of 1 Jan 2026
- Zashi now owned by new company
- Josh leaves ECC to be Founder / CEO of new company
- But who will do the coding for Zashi at new company?
- Josh would take ECC devs to join him
- So plan was always to leave ECC and empty it out
This is my opinion but if you think about what was supposed to happen and what really happened, you can figure out motivation for everyone behavior
I ask again
- Who are the promoters?
- Who are the investors?
They made this problem. Community deserve to know.
I want to reiterate that I respect both sides. The dilemma is that Zcash cannot survive without developers, and developers cannot sustainably operate without the support of people from the financial and institutional world that the board inevitably interacts with. This factor is often underestimated.
We are operating in a multi-billion-dollar industry where successful, stable teams matter. At the same time, corporate conflicts tend to repel investors and partners. There is nothing attractive about internal conflict.
I sincerely hope you can reach mutual understanding as soon as possible. In this dispute, there is no one without whom things will simply move forward smoothly. There will be no winners here. Please find a way to come to an agreement.
And a final request to some individual commenters: please do not escalate the situation with personal accusations. In the long run, this only undermines the very foundation we are all standing on.
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Without going into the specifics at this time, the timeline and details surfaced on their site do not tell the entire story.
The objective with this was to:
- get to 5-10 years of runway for the team,
- build sustainability without the ongoing reliance on the dev fund,
- grow the team to meet the challenges of scale,
- along with financial and legal support the team will need to get ZEC in the hands of billions,
- while making Zcash “too big to kill.”
In the narrative they posted, the promoters and investors are essentially the same - part of a broad industry coalition to achieve the above. The promoter is a Zcasher who was (and is) willing to help. The investors are a large group that intended a % of funding and support for the Zashi and Zcash core team, as well as a much larger % of allocation into the ZEC token. They understood the symbiosis - a strong UX and core team benefits everyone. This would have 10X’d the positive momentum for Zcash. There is still a path.
I appreciate the patience in allowing us to both support the ecosystem as we always have, while working through specifics to realize this path. This will be shared as soon as we are able.
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after thinking on this more its kind of a funny reality that Zcash is one of the only projects in all of crypto that has now been molded through two completely distinct VC cycles
the first being at origination and now almost 10 years later another cycle of VC capture. im not judging here btw just observing. i think the current volatility is a great thing for the project, it is a test of principles and agility. god speed to all, out with the ossified burecrats and lawyers, in with builders and fresh free to deploy capital
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What kind of “promoter” stays anonymous? Please share with Zcash community who the promoter is and who the investors are!
And very important - why did the promoter and investors try to rush the deal for Jan 1? That does not make any sense
Can anybody here give a good realistic reason why the promoter and investor had to have deal by Jan 1?
If they are genuine and honest people why can’t they wait one-two month for lawyers to check everything?
There is a bad smell about this “deal”
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Sorry I just want some answer to understand what is happening
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(post deleted by author)
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is the implication here that the promoter put you under an NDA where you cannot reveal who they are, or why their time sensitive requirements happened?
That makes no sense. Why would we submit a USD 2.67m grant application on 27th September for an company that we knew we were going to leave? The answer is that we didn’t know.
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I’m just dissapointed by all of this.
You’re all supposed to be better, you’ve claimed high standards but this isn’t a “Shining City On A Hill”, is it?
Try harder, be better, sort this out so nothing like it can ever happen again.
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When did team decide to leave company? Before or After the Board suspended CEO Josh?
Board say that CEO Josh was already creating a new company, deal or no deal. He had already decided. He was always going to leave and take team. These things do not just happen. They are planned long time before.
Question: Is there something you want to do with Zashi that is not possible in non-profit but can be done in new company?
Number Go Up
People Get Greedy
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