Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Zcash, publishes an open letter on his blog talking about the Zcash Developer Fund which will arrive after the halving in October 2020.
“I hope that the community will decide to renew the “Dev Fund” structure, allocating coins from future block rewards for core support functions such as software development, user support, business development, regulatory and government outreach, security auditing and monitoring, educational and marketing initiatives, new protocol development, and so forth”.
An invitation to the community that supports Zcash to renew development support according to the model in force until now and that after the first halving scheduled next October 2020 (at block 840 thousand) will cease.
Zooko does not deny the pessimism, hoping however that the ZEC community
“will offer to hire the Electric Coin Company (ECC) to do that work. But it is far from certain that the outcome from this process will be what I personally hope”.
Zcash risks losing its developers
As is well known, Zcash did not pre-mine, but its founding members decided to devote 10% of the coins mined in the first four years, to the founders, investors, employees and consultants.
This reward was called Founders Reward and for four years allowed the Electric Coin Company to continue developing the protocol.
However, the company doesn’t have all the rights to Zcash (only the brand) and can’t intervene at will to change the rules of operation of the blockchain. In fact, from the very beginning, the Zcash Foundation was established to protect the independence of the protocol.
However, now, just over a year after the first halving, there is the problem of how to continue the development of the protocol if there is no longer an economic source of secure funding to rely on.
Everyone is involved in the debate, including the other founding members of Zcash, and one of them, Professor Andrew Miller, had made a post on June 3rd, putting forward a series of hypotheses to establish or continue the Developer Fund, which is essential to extend the development of the project.
Electric Coin Company will support any decision of the community
Zooko Wilcox reassures the community that ECC will support the community’s decision by offering to develop, test and distribute the software update to “implement whatever the community decides“.
“We will be available”, continues Zooko, “even if that decision is to defund ECC, or to defund core support functions entirely, in which case we won’t be able to provide on-going support for the software ourselves in the long term. The future of Zcash is in the hands of the community”.
