ZIP 1016 Author Josh Swihart Calls to End Zcash’s Dev Fund Entirely

The architect of Zcash’s current funding model now wants to switch it off. In a new forum post on Friday (Oct. 30th), ZODL CEO Josh Swihart, who wrote ZIP 1016, argued the whole Zcash Development Fund should wind down before its November 2028 sunset, rather than cutting only the 8% slice that goes to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG).

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• Mission accomplished: Swihart says he designed the current model back when money for Zcash development was hard to come by. Privately backed teams have since shown up, he notes, and ZEC’s rally has lifted the two funds’ combined value above $300M by his count.

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• No half-measures: He opposes ZCG-only cuts, which he says would hand coinholders sole control of the 12% stream. Stake-weighted votes can be bought, he argues, citing Steem’s 2020 fork, and some in the community have privately told him they worry that speaking up could cost them funding. Big holders who want to back builders, in his view, can just fund them directly.

• His own stake: Responding to critics in the thread, Swihart said ZODL isn’t profitable and that scrapping the fund “also hurts us financially.”

• The compromise camp: Less than an hour later, Sean Bowe, Zooko Wilcox, and Shielded Labs’ Jason McGee floated a draft ZIP that would divert ZCG’s 8% into a new “Future Dev and Legal Defense Fund” lockbox, have ZCG send 50,000 ZEC into Zcash’s Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), and keep the 12% coinholder stream untouched.

• Zooming out: Swihart’s post is the latest entry in a crowded field that’s grown all week since our first look at the dev fund debate, including ZCG’s own taper offer. That said, none of these plans can ride along with NU7, which activates around Nov. 5th, so there’s still plenty of runway. As forum participant emersonian put it in Swihart’s thread, “There is no emergency.”