Zcash Co-Founder Sean Bowe Proposes Ending ZCG's Automatic Funding Stream
Key Takeaways
- •Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe has drafted a proposal to end the automatic 8% block-subsidy funding stream to Zcash Community Grants and redirect it to the network's sustainability reserve until the funding period ends in 2028.
- •Bowe argues that ZCG's treasury, which exceeds $125 million, is larger than the grants program was ever designed to handle.
- •ZCG's dashboard listed 91,453 ZEC plus $8.8 million in cash as of Wednesday, alongside $2.4 million in outstanding grant commitments, while a separate development lockbox held roughly $89 million in ZEC.
- •The proposal follows a September call from Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi to end the Zcash developer fund, which he said risks being politicized as it nears $100 million in value.
- •Because it is only a draft, Bowe's proposal must advance through Zcash's improvement process before any redirection takes effect, and the 8% stream continues flowing to ZCG in the meantime.
Zcash co-founder Sean Bowe has proposed ending the automatic funding stream to Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), arguing that the program's treasury is already large enough to continue backing projects without further automatic payments.
"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 a draft GitHub proposal shared by Bowe, ZCG's 8% share of the Zcash (ZEC) block subsidy would be redirected to the network's sustainability reserve, leaving the program's existing funds untouched. The draft is structured as a Zcash Improvement Proposal, the standard format for proposing changes to the network. Under the plan, the allocation would flow to the Network Sustainability Mechanism until the current funding period ends in 2028. That mechanism is designed to hold ZEC out of circulation and gradually reissue it through future block rewards.
The stakes are sizable for the grants program, whose budget comes from that ongoing slice of block rewards: if the stream is cut, ZCG would run on the funds it already holds rather than receiving new ZEC with each block. Bowe's proposal follows a similar call in September from Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, who proposed ending the Zcash developer fund when its current funding period expires, saying it risks being "politicized" as it approaches $100 million in value. Together, the two calls have drawn attention to how Zcash's block subsidy is divided between ecosystem funding and long-term reserves ahead of the funding period's 2028 end.
ZCG's dashboard listed 91,453 ZEC and $8.8 million in cash as of Wednesday, alongside $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.
As a draft, Bowe's proposal would still need to advance through Zcash's improvement process before any redirection takes effect; until then, the 8% stream continues flowing to ZCG.
