ZF hold $16m USD in assets

[GGuy]

@Dodger the issue here is ZF is not transparent. Everything you say just leads to more questions.

Evidence 1 - ZF posted strategic objectives only when asked

I search blogs and quarterly report but was unable to find this information.

@Dodger

For Zcash, we have three strategic objectives:

• Support the Zcash community
• Foster the growth of the Zcash ecosystem
• Make Zcash smarter

Evidence 2 - What has ZF done to make Zcash smarter

No roadmap, no discussions on the topic, and no mention of it in the quarterly report. Why don’t I see any mention of this if it’s as fundamental as a strategic objective? Apparently budget issues?

@Dodger

ZF receives the smallest slice of the Dev Fund. More funding would enable us to increase our budget, meaning that we could do more, quicker. For example, we could hire more engineers, which would allow us to accelerate work on Zebra, deploy FROST quicker (and begin exploring some of the benefits it will unlock), and start work on other improvements sooner, such as programmability, exploring adding OMR- or detection key-based light wallet services to Zebra, improve network-level privacy by taking advantage of Arti, and other ideas that we have for improving Zcash that we don’t have the resources to prioritize anytime soon.

Evidence 3 - Zcash has $16m is assets which includes over $6m in USD

If ZF sold only 10,000ZEC today, that would leave ZF with almost $7m USD. That’s enough to fund ZF for 2 years even if the price of ZEC went to $0! That seems crazy conservative to me. I’m not a business person so I started this thread. Hopefully @dodger will respond right and it’ll clear this all up.

@Dodger

Also, in the event of a “black swan” event, I’d like to be able to sustain our current team and operations for a year, so we have time to adapt to whatever new circumstances we face.

@dodger does that mean we have $9m to invest on your strategic priorities like “making Zcash smarter?”. I understand it’s not as simple as that but can’t we think up some inventive way to use those assets constructively? We don’t have to use them all up TODAY. But maybe a plan for them would be good? Maybe ZF is speculating the price of ZEC will go up? If that’s an active choice ZF is making and ZF should be transparent about it. I’m of the opinion almost everyone here (including myself) is far too bias that the price of ZEC will go up in the long term so we should be conservative when making decisions based on the “hope” ZEC will go up. Maybe I’m over correcting for that bias we all have?

Evidence 4 - The board approves the budget

@Dodger

However, it’s worth highlighting that the board approves the budget

My assumption was ZF proposes a budget to the board and the board either approves of rejects it. But you’re right. The board are probably doing a lot of deep thinking on the operation and budget of ZF. Let me check the meeting minutes.

Directors present: Andrew Miller, Ian Miers, Amber Baldet, Peter Van Valkenburgh, Jack Gavigan

Foundation employees also present: Alex Bornstein (Secretary)

Topics discussed:

1. Approved May board meeting minutes.
2. Discussed the state of the Foundation’s finances.
3. Discussed hiring progress, and potential for further team expansion.
4. Conducted meeting prep for a future joint board meeting.
5. Discussed potential board members.

Well that’s incredibly vague. But maybe it’s good news? Was there any deep thinking here? Which team is ZF expanding? Or was the outcome “no expansion”? Who knows. Not me! Any details @Dodger? Or are you suggesting I need to contact the current board members to find out more?

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@Dodger PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. I hope you can understand my frustration. When I have these questions about ECC I go to their blog and find out ALL the information. For ZCG I can go to the meeting minutes and find out an incredible amount of detail about their reasoning to spend or not spend funds. Sometime even including which way the members voted. Congrats ZCG! ZF on the other hand, the organisation that’s meant to be the most community focused, is by far the least transparent. WTF? I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions but I simply shouldn’t need to ask them in the first place. In my mind it’s a major failure of ZF.