Good point, aiyadt!
This reminds me of something related that I’ve been thinking about. Almost everything of value requires long-term support and improvement, for years, for its full value to be realized. I think our current processes here, which are mostly about giving grants for specific projects for a few months, don’t fully match that reality. This is true about both modular, narrow-scope projects like building and operating a block explorer as well as about big, ambitious projects like implementing ZSAs or Arti, and also about projects outside of software development, such as building an online community or a “Universal Basic Income” style program in a specific region or culture.
I also think that valuable projects typically have a wider scope than anyone initially realizes. An example of this is the grant that the Zcash Foundation made to Zondax to implement shielded Zcash support in Ledger devices. This was successful—within the planned scope of the grant. But since nobody has implemented support for it in the Ledger Live app, it has never (yet) been useful to any users. I think similar things are likely to happen with future projects.
For example, the THORChain grant to Nighthawk and the big ZSAs grant application by QEdit, for either of them to provide actual functionality to users, will definitely require wallet support (which I know Nighthawk has already started on!), and I think will also require a lot of other things, like support from issuers of tokens/stablecoins/NFTs, cross-chain-interop, maybe liquidity provision, maybe other bizdev operations, and maybe other things.
Who is the Zcash community expecting to figure out what those things are and provide those things, and how will that be funded? I basically think per-project grants are a bit of an awkward fit for what the Zcash community needs.
How do we as the Zcash community make individuals and teams into long-term, sustainable, wide-scope contributors to the Zcash movement? This is the main goal of the original ZIP-1014.
Thinking about this, the immediate, relatively straightforward improvement that I can imagine is if future ZOMG committees would establish a tradition that successful grants will be presumed to require ongoing support, improvement, and scope-enlargement for years after the completion of the first grant, and future ZOMG’s are expected (by the community) to support that.
But in addition to that, I still think that the Zcash community should launch some experiments with more creative (and riskier!) mechanisms. I can think of a few ideas:
- Launch some kind of DAO (probably on Ethereum, because that’s easiest).
- Give retroactive grants for past service. This is being tested by Optimism Labs and Vitalik Buterin. I can certainly think of a number of people who have contributed greatly to the Zcash mission with no reward to themselves, and I think they richly deserve a retroactive reward, and I imagine that it might be good for the Zcash community, and for long-term support and improvement of our projects, if we demonstrated that we honor past contributors that way.
- Direct a slice of the Dev Fund into Gitcoin Quadratic Funding grants.
- Have the ZOMG committee allocate a fraction of its Dev Fund slice to one or more recipients for the remainder of the Dev Fund. That would make that recipient be a first-class member of the Zcash Dev Fund, alongside Zcash Foundation and Electric Coin Co, and it would make them independent from the Zcash Foundation and from the U.S. government.
Clearly such experiments would come with risks and downsides (some of which are the risks and downsides already inherent in the Zcash community entrusting so much ZEC to the Zcash Foundation and the Electric Coin Co), but so does everything new and valuable.
Also these experiments could be tried on a smaller scale at first! During the time that ZIP 1014 was discussed and ratified, the price of Zcash was varying between ~$50–$70/ZEC, so if we use the price of $60, the total Dev Fund stream to the ZOMG (105,000 ZEC per year) could be predicted to be worth about $6m per year.
After the first ZOMG committee was inaugurated, the price of Zcash varied between ~$60–$300/ZEC. If we use today’s price of $150/ZEC, then the Dev Fund stream allocated to the ZOMG (105,000 ZEC per year) is worth about $16m per year. What if the community and the ZOMG decided to allocate 10% of that to new models instead of the traditional grants model? Then those new models would get 10,500 ZEC per year (~$1.6m) in the first year, and the traditional model would continue to get 94,500 ZEC (~$14.4m) that year.
(P.S. Oh yeah, and along with support, maintenance, improvement, and scope-enlargement – e.g. integrating with wallets and other chains and products and services – there’s also ongoing security assurance, monitoring, and response. Who is the Zcash community expecting to provide that, for all of our new features, and how will that be funded?)