Electric Coin Co. (ECC) has posted a ZIP for consideration in ongoing discussions about the Zcash Development Fund. Our CEO, Josh Swihart, published it today on the Zcash Community Forum, and we are looking forward to hearing feedback from the community.
If you are reading this, you probably know that the current dev fund will expire in November of this year, and if the community opts not to extend it or institute a replacement, the dev recipients, including ECC, Zcash Foundation, and Zcash Grants Committee, will stop receiving a portion of mining rewards to support our Zcash-related initiatives. This may force some or all of us to either find new funding sources or begin to ramp down operations.
As we’ve stated previously, ECC believes letting the dev fund expire is one acceptable option; instituting a new non-direct funding model is another path we’d endorse. We will not endorse or accept direct allocation from another four-year Zcash Dev Fund proposal that directly distributes to any formal organization, including our own.
However, our ZIP provides an up-to-one-year extension to the current dev fund to allow time for the creation of a new non-direct funding model, mentioned previously. If this idea could be established and approved by the community at any point within the one-year-extension period, the non-direct funding model would supersede and terminate the one-year extension of the current dev fund.
From our May 1 blog:
And so we, the community, have a critically important decision to make:
- We can simply let the development fund expire.
- We can create a new development fund, with more or fewer recipients who directly receive future funding, by embedding the addresses of those organizations’ wallets directly into the protocol, as we have today. Several members of the community have proposed such options.
- We can consider a funding model in which no organization is guaranteed funding with its address coded into the base layer. That might look like a decentralized grant model, similar to what I described here, or an alternative where funds are allocated through a DAO or other mechanism.
It should be noted that the decision needs to be made soon. Depending on the community’s desired path, implementing changes to issuance in Zcash could take up to 5 months, which means we’ll need clear consensus on the path forward by early July.
We believe another four years with the same or similar model is fraught and that the community deserves a bigger voice and direct participation, increased accountability for outcomes, and greater resiliency for Zcash. We’re looking forward to the continuing conversation over the next few weeks.
