Zcash dev fund rally to $95M reignites governance fight as Qureshi urges 2028 sunset
Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi wants the ZEC developer fund wound down when it expires, while Paradigm's Matt Huang and others argue a pool worth nearly $100 million needs thoughtful control, not abolition.
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Zcash's development fund has swelled past $95 million in value as ZEC rallies, and the growth has reopened a familiar argument: what is a nine-figure treasury inside a decentralized protocol actually for?
Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi believes the answer is that the current pool should be the last one. Writing on X on Friday, he said the fund, which is set to expire in 2028 under existing protocol rules, has enough to cover the remaining work on Zcash. He also warned that as the balance approaches $100 million, it risks becoming politicized. "I'm of the opinion that this should be the final Dev Fund," he wrote.
Per ZecStats, the fund held 63,962 ZEC at the time of writing. The mechanism, sometimes called the lockbox, collects 0.1875 ZEC per block — 12% of the block subsidy since the NU6 upgrade — and the tokens sit outside circulating supply until governance decides to release them.
Not everyone wants it gone
Paradigm founder Matt Huang pushed back from the other direction. In a Wednesday X post, he argued the fund matters more than ever "in this age of AI cyber capabilities" and at a moment when quantum computing is advancing quickly. On governance, the two investors found common ground: Qureshi rejected moving control to pure token holder voting but endorsed a partial model in which token holders elect temporary councils. Huang, who said pure token governance could introduce unpredictability that undermines long-term trust in ZEC as a monetary asset, proposed a hybrid structure blending governance forms.
Others see a simpler solution. Maxime Desalle, an investment analyst at Winklevoss Capital, wrote on X Thursday that the community should simply do away with the fund altogether, which he argued would dissolve the governance disputes in one stroke. In an earlier post on Sept. 9, he contended that the fund could weaken Zcash's security while recreating the bureaucratic dependencies typical of welfare states.
The protocol's founder has defended the funding arrangement. Zooko Wilcox said in a Sept. 1 X post that the Zcash Community Grants Committee was among the main reasons Zcash "has survived and grown to where it is today," and on Sept. 14 he noted that the committee accounts for 40% of the dev fund's spending.
The debate now centers on a choice Zcash's community will eventually have to make: extend a funding stream that some view as the project's backbone, or let it lapse and hand the protocol over to voluntary funding and whatever governance model it can agree on.
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