Zcash Co-Founder Shawn Bowe Says Automatic Funding for Community Grants Should End With $125 Million Stockpiled

Zcash co-founder Shawn Bowe has proposed ending automatic funding for the Zcash Community Grants, or ZCG, program.

Cointelegraph reported on October 27 that Bowe wrote on X that ZCG has already accumulated more than $125 million and will receive several million dollars more before the current funding stream ends. The program was not designed from the outset to manage funding on that scale, he wrote.

Bowe also published a draft proposal on GitHub. Under the plan, 8% of the Zcash block subsidy currently allocated to ZCG would be redirected to a Network Sustainability Fund, while existing grant reserves would remain untouched. The revised allocation would flow into that sustainability mechanism through 2028, when the current funding period expires. The mechanism removes ZEC from circulation and gradually redistributes it through future block rewards.

In September, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi also proposed that the Zcash developer fund should end when the current funding period expires. At the time, he said the fund was approaching $100 million and risked becoming politicized.

The ZCG dashboard currently shows 91,453 ZEC and $8.8 million in cash, with about $2.4 million in unpaid grant commitments. The ZEC holdings alone are worth about $111 million. A separate development lockbox holds 72,351 ZEC, worth about $89 million.