Zcash’s development fund has become the center of a fresh governance dispute after the value of the treasury climbed to roughly $95 million with the rise in ZEC.
Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi said Friday on X that the Zcash Dev Fund should end in 2028 when it expires under the current rules. 「I think this should be the last Dev Fund.」 He argued that the money already accumulated is enough to complete Zcash’s remaining development work, and that a fund nearing $100 million carries a growing risk of politicization.
The fund holds 63,962 ZEC in a lockbox
According to on-chain data platform ZecStats, the Zcash development fund currently holds 63,962 ZEC, worth about $95 million at current prices.
The treasury is funded through a fixed portion of block subsidies. Under the NU6 upgrade, the development fund receives 12% of the allocation, or 0.1875 ZEC per block. Those assets remain in a lockbox and have not entered the circulating market. Their eventual use is still subject to governance decisions.
Paradigm pushes back on ending the fund
Qureshi’s proposal split opinion across the crypto sector. Paradigm founder Matt Huang responded on Wednesday, saying the development fund is especially important at a time when AI-driven cyberattack capabilities are improving and quantum computing is advancing quickly.
Huang’s position is straightforward: privacy research is not a short-term effort, and steady funding matters for Zcash’s long-run competitiveness. He opposed shutting the fund down after 2028.
The dispute is also about who gets to decide
The fight is not only about whether the fund should remain in place. It is also about control.
Qureshi said he opposes handing authority to pure token-holder voting. He does, however, support a hybrid structure that brings in community input, such as allowing token holders to elect a temporary committee instead of relying on direct holder votes for every decision.
Huang agreed on that point. He said pure token-holder governance could introduce 「unpredictability」 and, over time, weaken the trust foundation of Zcash as a monetary asset. He did not lay out a specific framework.
Winklevoss Capital investment analyst Maxime Desalle took a harder line. In a post on X, he suggested that the Zcash community should cancel the development fund entirely, saying that doing so would resolve all governance disputes at once. In another post dated Sept. 9, Desalle said the fund could harm Zcash’s security while rebuilding dependence and bureaucracy similar to a welfare state.
Zooko Wilcox defends the existing structure
Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox came out in support of keeping the fund. In a Sept. 1 post, he said the Zcash Community Grants Committee was 「one of the key reasons」 Zcash has survived and grown to this point.
Wilcox later clarified on Sept. 14 that the committee accounts for only 40% of the development fund budget, with the rest directed elsewhere.
NU7 has pushed the issue into sharper focus
Zcash confirmed in November that the NU7 upgrade is going live, reducing block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds while keeping the halving mechanism in place. The report said the upgrade helped drive a 20% one-day gain in ZEC and lifted the development fund’s value to about $95 million, turning the question of how the money should be spent from a technical matter into a political one.
The same kind of debate has appeared in other ecosystems. The report pointed to the Ethereum Foundation and the Polkadot treasury as examples of protocol-level funding structures that have faced similar questions over whether core developers, token holders, or a hybrid model should control treasury spending.
Zcash’s privacy focus makes the issue more sensitive. Under the current framework, 2028 is the final known deadline for the fund. If Qureshi’s view gains support, Zcash could become one of the few privacy chains to eliminate its development fund entirely. If Huang and Wilcox prevail, the fund is likely to continue in some form.