- Paradigm’s Matt Huang argued Zcash must keep its Dev Fund for tech challenges.
- Qureshi says Zcash aims to be a private Bitcoin alternative and must eventually ossify.
- Maxime Desalle contends Zcash development should rely on market-based approaches.
Zcash is facing a growing debate over who should have the most influence over the network’s future. The argument pits direct voting by token holders against representative governance and private funding.
Things heated up after Paradigm founder Matt Huang contended that Zcash needs to keep its development fund (Dev Fund), particularly with big technical challenges ahead like quantum resistance and AI-related security risks.
However, Huang also raised concerns about pure “coinvoting,” saying that if votes go in unpredictable directions, it could shake faith in Zcash as a form of money. He also revealed that Paradigm is an investor in both ZEC and ZODL.
Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi on Representative Governance
Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly took a similar view on letting token holders vote directly, but he went further, explaining how a different approach could work.
He argued that Zcash is trying to become a dependable, privacy-first alternative to Bitcoin, and eventually it’ll need to lock down or “ossify” its protocol. Still, Qureshi said that time hasn’t come yet, because projects like Tachyon and quantum resistance work still need a lot of development.
For Qureshi, the real issue isn’t whether a Dev Fund should exist at all, but who gets to run it.
He said it should probably be the last big development fund and should eventually wind down once Zcash reaches a point where core development can happen on its own, rather than becoming a permanent grant-making body.
Qureshi later explained that what he’d prefer is something like a representative democracy, where ZEC holders would elect delegates or council members on a regular basis. That way, token holders get a say and someone to hold accountable, without every funding decision needing a direct coin vote.
The Case for Private Market Funding
Another voice in the debate was Maxime Desalle, an investor at Winklevoss Capital. He has argued that Zcash development could increasingly be paid for outside the protocol through donations, investment, and other market-based approaches.
In community discussions, he pointed to groups like Shielded Labs, ZODL, Tachyon, and Valar as examples of projects already getting private funding even with the Dev Fund still around. His reasoning is that dropping protocol-level funding may let other funding models develop, instead of putting all the decision-making power in one fund.
Related: Zcash Wants to Burn Fees and Recycle Them Into Miner Rewards
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