Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe says Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) no longer needs an automatic slice of every block, and he has written the rule change to cut it off.
Bowe published a draft Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) late Monday that would end ZCG’s 8% share of the block subsidy and redirect it to the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), the protocol-level fund defined in ZIP 237, until the stream was already due to lapse. Nothing already in ZCG’s custody would be clawed back, so the committee could go on funding projects from its reserves. The 12% stream that coinholders vote on is untouched.
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Swihart and Miers Push Back
Josh Swihart, founder of Zcash developer ZODL, responded on X that “it’d be a mistake to kill only one part of the dev fund.” He called for retiring the ZCG and coinholder streams together and pointing both at the NSM until the halving, saying “a half measure leaves the door open to ongoing debate and politics.” Swihart disclosed that ZODL recently got a retroactive coinholder grant, and that shutting the whole fund would cut off that potential source of money for his company.
Cryptographer Ian Miers took issue with where the money would go. In a forum post, he said capping what any one organization draws from the dev fund was “a very good idea,” but warned the NSM route could become “a dev-fund-in-waiting, where the reserve gets redirected later,” and that it “just pays miners with more steps.”
Bowe replied that the NSM “already exists and is the location of least resistance,” adding that “the issuance has to happen anyway, so it needs to go somewhere.”
A Price-Dependent Treasury
Bowe wrote on X that ZCG “was never designed to handle this amount of funding.”
His proposal takes the inputs from ZCG’s public dashboard, 91,452.98 ZEC plus about $8.8 million in dollars, minus roughly $2.4 million in outstanding grant liabilities, and values them at assumed prices: $125.3 million at a ZEC price of $1,300, $97.8 million at $1,000 and $52.1 million at $500. Bowe noted that the dashboard numbers have not been independently reconciled, and the worksheet is marked “Updates required.”
That works out to 144 ZEC daily at today’s subsidy, or roughly $68.3 million annually under Bowe’s $1,300 price assumption. ZCG’s own spending runs far below that: $1.53 million in Q1 2026, per a Financial Privacy Foundation report the draft cites.
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The post Zcash Developers Split Over Where Grants Program’s 8% Block Share Should Go appeared first on Unchained.
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