Zcash Developers Propose Restructuring Community Grants Funding

The draft, shared by Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox on October 30, represents a compromise intended to resolve ongoing governance friction. Under the plan, the ZCG’s portion of the block subsidy would be redirected into a newly created Future Dev and Legal Defense Fund Lockbox. This capital would remain locked at the protocol level without a designated custodian, pending a future community decision on its distribution.

While the proposal halts the automatic inflow of new capital, it allows the grants committee to continue operations using its existing assets, provided it fulfills the required 50,000 ZEC donation within 30 days of community approval. This payment would effectively move the tokens out of circulation and into the Network Sustainability Mechanism. The authors estimate that after this donation, the ZCG would retain approximately 41,452 ZEC and $8.8 million in dollar-denominated holdings, which they calculate could sustain operations for over six years based on current spending levels.

Implementing the redirection of the funding stream would require a network upgrade following the scheduled NU7 release. However, the donation requirement operates independently of these software changes. Wilcox, who has framed the recent tensions as a governance crisis, has urged stakeholders to consolidate behind this compromise, suggesting that competing proposals—including those calling for a total shutdown of the grants program—should be withdrawn.