Zcash Plan Would End the Grants Stream and Move 50,000 ZEC

A joint proposal from Tachyon Group and Shielded Labs would shut off the funding stream behind Zcash Community Grants and take 50,000 ZEC out of the committee's treasury. Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox announced it on Friday. The draft was created on 29 October, carries no ZIP number, no activation height and no reference implementation. Sean Bowe, the cryptographer who leads Tachyon, withdrew his own earlier proposal the same day and asked the grants committee to withdraw the plan it had published. What the 50,000 ZEC is worth depends on which account is doing the arithmetic, and the four read here do not agree.

Two mechanisms, one document

The first is the stream. ZCG's 8% share of block rewards would move into a new Future Dev and Legal Defense Fund Lockbox for the remainder of the stream's term, a protocol-level account with no custodian and no spending key, from which nothing can be withdrawn until a separate future ZIP defines how. The coinholder-controlled fund's 12% stream is untouched, as is the Deferred Dev Fund Lockbox. The second mechanism is the donation. ZCG would direct the Financial Privacy Foundation, which holds its money, to send the 50,000 ZEC to a published unspendable address within 30 days of community acceptance, then publish the transaction IDs once the payments are mined. Bowe's withdrawn draft sent the 8% straight to the Network Sustainability Mechanism. The joint version parks it instead.

Four prices for one transfer

Unchained valued the 50,000 ZEC at about $61 million on Friday afternoon, using roughly $1,224 per ZEC from CoinGecko, and COINTURK carried the same pair of figures overnight. crypto.news and a KuCoin flash both used the $1,300 per ZEC the proposal's authors assume in their own arithmetic, which puts the donation near $65 million. Wilcox's forum post called it "$50M", a gap Unchained flagged against its own number and put down to the price used. The treasury total moves the same way, at about $112 million on Friday's market price against $125.3 million at the authors' assumption. None of these supersedes another. ZEC was clearing $1,200 in early September, and because the obligation is denominated in ZEC, no dollar figure attached to it holds for longer than a day.

Destroyed, or coming back

The accounts split on what happens to the coins. COINTURK's headline calls it a burn and its summary says about $61 million in ZEC will be destroyed. crypto.news reported on Friday evening that the donated ZEC leaves circulation and enters the Network Sustainability Mechanism balance, returning through future block subsidies instead of being permanently removed. Those are different claims about one transfer and they do not reconcile. The mechanics are not in dispute: an address published in advance, with no key that can spend from it. The committee keeps operating on what is left, 41,452.98 ZEC on the dashboard figure the proposal cites, plus about $8.8 million in dollar holdings against roughly $2.4 million of grant liabilities. At the authors' estimate of $9.4 million a year, that is about 6.4 years of runway.

NU7 has to land first

Wilcox framed the dispute as larger than a budget question.

"The Zcash community is going through a governance crisis," Wilcox said.

Redirecting the stream and folding the donated coins into the mechanism both require consensus changes in a network upgrade after NU7, the upgrade this desk last reported set at block 3,543,405 while the specification still read undecided. The donation itself needs no upgrade, only acceptance. Tom Howard, who wrote a competing ZIP, told the forum he could tolerate the joint plan and would pull his own if ZCG drops its proposal and backs this one. A user posting as emersonian asked for three months and said there is no emergency. We could not establish when the community acceptance that starts the 30-day clock is meant to happen, and no date for it has been published.