Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox and longtime Zcash cryptographer Sean Bowe, who leads Tachyon Group, on Friday lined up behind a single plan for Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) to stop collecting block rewards and give up more than half of its ZEC, as a fight this week over the grants program’s swelling war chest played out on X and the project’s forum.
The draft Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP), from Bowe’s group and Zooko’s Shielded Labs, would end ZCG’s 8% share of block rewards in a network upgrade after NU7. That slice would instead pile up in a new Future Dev and Legal Defense Fund lockbox, frozen until a later ZIP decides how to spend it. The ZCG committee would also have 30 days after the proposal’s acceptance to send 50,000 ZEC to an unspendable address feeding the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), a reserve that releases ZEC to miners over time.
At about $1,224 per ZEC on CoinGecko Friday afternoon, that donation is worth roughly $61 million, by Unchained’s math. It is a little over half of the roughly 91,450 ZEC that the ZIP cites from ZCG’s own dashboard, worth about $112 million. The 8% stream adds about 144 ZEC a day, or about $176,000 at that price. Zooko’s forum post described the donation as “$50M.”
“The Zcash community is going through a governance crisis,” Zooko wrote in the forum post, asking authors of rival ZIPs to “withdraw yours and support this one.” He added that Shielded Labs “does not take any money from the Zcash Community Grants program.”
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A Day After ZCG’s Offer
On Thursday, ZCG floated its own plan: taper its funding about 3% a month until the 2032 halving and move about 36,200 of its ZEC to the NSM, keeping about 55,200. The committee put the total headed to future block rewards at about 98,000 ZEC and called the idea “a first look, not the final proposal.”
Bowe had gone further on Monday. “It’s time to turn off the ZCG funding stream,” he wrote, proposing a draft that sends the 8% to the NSM. He withdrew that draft on Friday in favor of the joint ZIP. Under the joint ZIP, ZCG would still make grants from the ZEC it has left, and the proposal says the change “reduces the risks and pressure that come with large amounts of money.” The 12% stream for the coinholder-controlled fund is unchanged.
Pressure From Both Directions
Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz replied to ZCG’s plan on X that it was “nowhere near good enough” and urged the committee to “just cut it off as per sean’s proposal,” referring to Bowe. On Friday, Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss called a ZCG committee member’s unfollowing of Mumtaz “embarrassing, childlike behavior,” saying the member was “not qualified to run 110 million dollars with no accountability!”
On the forum, some objected to the pace. “There is no emergency,” wrote one user, emersonian, asking to “give the community 3 months to decide all this.” Another, Milton, said he would not back pausing ZCG’s stream unless the stream to coin voters was paused too. Tom Howard, a forum user who wrote a rival draft ZIP to wind down ZCG, said he could “tolerate” the joint plan and would withdraw his ZIP to back it if ZCG drops its own plan and backs the joint one.
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