Zooko Wilcox Pushes for New Developer Fund to Support Zcash

Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Electric Coin Company - the firm behind the privacy-focused cryptocurrency zcash - has made an appeal for the creation of a new "Dev Fund" to support the future operations of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency.

The move comes after much debate over the continuation of the project's controversial "Founders' reward," which took centerstage at Zcon1 and even drove a portion of the zcash community to fork off into a new network, Ycash.

Having never taken the ICO path of fundraising, zcash was originally bootstrapped by a group of investors to the tune of $3 million.

The original Dev Fund, according to the post, arose when Wilcox and ECC co-founder and CTO Nathan Wilcox got ECC to buy back some of the founders rewards to be used for funding ongoing operations.

"We decided to do this because we thought that having an independent entity from the Electric Coin Company would be an important part of the Zcash community's decentralization and stability in the long run," Wilcox wrote.

Now, with zcash set to end the founders' reward in October 2020, a new means of funding development is required, according to the ECC CEO. Wilcox said: "I opted for the initial Dev Fund to sunset itself, so that in the future, if Zcash were a success and a community were to grow up to support it, that community would have to collectively decide what to do next."

The options ahead, he said, include allocating all new ZEC issued to the network's miners, creating a new Dev Fund with a percentage of new coins issued, or "Other alternatives."

"This decision isn't about the Electric Coin Company. If all of the employees of the Electric Coin Company were to board the same airplane tomorrow to go to an off-site meeting, and that plane were to crash with no survivors, the Zcash community would still be facing the exact same choice: shall we use some of the tens of millions of dollars that we're spending on issuance every month to fund core support functions like protocol development, software support, security auditing, government outreach, educational initiatives, and business development, or shall we instead send 100% of that money to miners?".

Finally, Wilcox called for community members to make their voices heard, either on public forums or by emailing zcash.

The Zcash Foundation is expected to publish a procedure for making a community decision "Soon," according to Wilcox, while ECC will publish a blog post setting out how it will assess proposals in the next few days.