Zcash Grants Committee Backs Down on Plan to Give Up 98,000 ZEC
Zcash Community Grants withdrew its week-old offer to hand part of its treasury and future funding to miners, leaving rival plans for its 8% share open.
Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), the five-member committee that funds Zcash development, dropped its plan to redirect ~98,000 ZEC toward future mining rewards less than a week after proposing it, saying "we've decided not to take this proposal forward."
What's the Scoop?
The Plan: ZCG had offered to move ~36,200 ZEC of its ~91,500 ZEC treasury into the Network Sustainability Mechanism, a reserve that pays miners slowly over decades, and to take less than half the new ZEC it's due by the 2028 halving.
The Backlash: ZCG gets 8% of all newly minted ZEC, about 144 coins a day, and ZEC's rally has turned it into what Zcash founder Zooko calls a "governance crisis." Critics targeted a ZCG-funded campaign at an adult-industry convention, and Zcash Labs' Josh Swihart argued "It's time to end the Zcash Dev Fund."
What's Next: The withdrawal leaves a compromise from Sean Bowe and Zooko as the leading plan: it would end ZCG's 8% share, park it in a locked fund for future development and legal defense, and have ZCG give 50,000 ZEC to the miners' reserve. The whole dev fund expires in 2028. ZEC is up ~11% in the past 24 hours.
David Christopher
David is a writer/analyst at Bankless. Prior to joining Bankless, he worked for a series of early-stage crypto startups and on grants from the Ethereum, Solana, and Urbit Foundations. He graduated from Skidmore College in New York. He currently lives in the Midwest and enjoys NFTs, but no longer participates in them.
