Block reward ZEC have been inadvertently designed to work as a USD short. The results speak for themselves. What do I mean? USD short
- Org denominates salaries/ grants in USD
- Hedges (sells) block reward ZEC at point in time X, to acquire USD to cover liability
- Org waits for duration of time Y, then un-hedges back to ZEC/ pays USD denominated liability in ZEC
If ZEC drops during the time duration Y, org has effectively gamed Zcash buy selling high and buying low.
If ZEC increases, org isn’t forced to buy back higher - instead their newly acquired (or excess) ZEC from duration Y can be paid to the USD liability. The higher that ZEC might have moved, the easier it is to pay the USD liability. Buying back ZEC higher is the point of last resort.
When the Org buys back/ un-hedges on marginal increases or decreases, there is little impact to Zcash markets.
This all goes without even talking about ZEC as a Bitcoin short. We can thank the ASIC PoW mega miners for that market disposition.
Short the USD has been a slowly losing battle since Zcash was launched:
This is possible, but the opposite could be true also. Protocol encoded development teams is part of the unspoken “I Agree” terms of service for any ZEC buyer/ holder
The assertion here is that some degree of indiscriminate project team funding is good because it assures that Zcash always has a baseline of human capital who are working to grow/ improve/ build/ plan for the future.
Without a Dev Fund, Zcash risks a more severe human capital loss than what it just experienced in the past couple years of the bear market.
As mentioned ZKP is a growing crypto sector theme, so we’ve got to acknowledge the risk that other projects wouldn’t mind (they would probably be happy) poaching Zcash protocol engineers to begin working on their competitor projects.