Hi,
We spent a lot of time on Dev Fund governance and how to facilitate it through protocol block rewards. I was already asking about the dev fund post 2024 back in 2020. I think Zcash is now crossing the chasm.
The size of the crypto market has grown a lot since 2016 and again since 2020. Every day more people across crypto, Bitcoin and the broader ecosystem are learning about private money that can be quantum resistant in the future. Zcash is a project that will not ossify until its mission is complete.
It is incredible to see the excitement across crypto (if you ignore Bitcoin maxis) and to see protocols and apps integrate with Zcash for swaps, lending and more in a permissionless way. That is how the bigger chains work. Some still have foundations and organizations to support core work, but most of the development is driven by customer demand and business value.
One thing that is widely accepted in crypto is that privacy is very much needed. We have always known that. Sometimes people need to realize the value they are creating before they decide to protect it.
You might be thinking, where am I going with all this. We are now seeing public treasury companies allocate to Zcash solely based on their own analysis of its importance and potential growth. The same point applies to what the VanEck CEO said about Zcash on CNBC. All of this is unpaid. Zero zats from the dev fund are directly spent on this. You can say that the development of Halo, Zashi and Orchard led to all of this. Zcash is getting free marketing, free integrations and more. This is the Lindy effect, or the Zindy effect as Mert would say.
I think ZEC will appreciate a lot in the coming years, after the next halving, with the successful deployment of Project Tachyon and especially as the Orchard pool continues to grow. This will also be driven by DAT buying. My goal is to convince these DATs to use the shielded pool. That requires custodians and leading hardware wallets to support the Orchard pool and we need to support any work that is blocking this. If any DAT is successful, there is a high chance they will contribute to Zcash ecosystem funding, similar to Bitwise. I can say this with high confidence.
ZEC went from the 50s to 500. I believe it will go from the 500s to 5000.
At this point I do not think we should continue to divert new ZEC from block rewards toward C and C. Just like almost all foundations today except for Bitcoin, we should leverage existing governance, with some improvements, to fund ongoing core work. Alternatively, we can burn some or most of it for network sustainability.
I am very confident that by 2028 the ZEC in the current treasuries and lockbox will have grown so much that we will not actually need additional issuance. This ZIP, once deployed, will result in further Zcash adoption.
These are my thoughts on a community and coinholder funding model in 2028. We need that structure, but without any new ZEC rewards flowing into it.