Zcash co-founder proposes taking grant funding off autopilot

Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe proposed ending the automatic funding stream to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), redirecting its 8% share of the Zcash (ZEC) block subsidy to the network’s sustainability reserve while leaving existing funds untouched.

Bowe said ZCG’s treasury was large enough to continue funding projects without further automatic payments. Under the draft GitHub proposal he shared, the allocation would flow to the Network Sustainability Mechanism until the current funding period ends in 2028. The mechanism is designed to hold ZEC out of circulation and gradually reissue it through future block rewards. “ZCG has over $125M in funding, and will receive millions more before the spigot is turned off,” Bowe said Tuesday on X. “The program was never designed to handle this amount of funding.”

In September, Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, proposed ending the Zcash developer fund when its current funding period expires, saying that it risks being “politicized” as it approaches $100 million in value.

ZCG’s dashboard listed 91,453 ZEC and $8.8 million in cash as of Wednesday, with $2.4 million in outstanding grant commitments. The ZEC holdings alone were worth about $111 million at press time. The network’s separate development lockbox held 72,351 ZEC, worth roughly $89 million, according to ZecStats.