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The Zcash network is decentralized, self-funded and built with cutting-edge cryptography.
Three organizations receive issuance from a Zcash development fund, which totals 20 percent of mining rewards. The other 80 percent of Zcash issuance is distributed to miners for their part in securing the network.
In November 2019, Electric Coin Co. donated the Zcash trademark to the Zcash Foundation under an agreement that stipulates both parties must agree on any network upgrade that would create a new consensus protocol of Zcash. Zcash governance depends on community input. The trademark agreement prevents either party from taking action that is blatantly contrary to the clear consensus of the Zcash community. “Clear consensus” is determined through community polling within and outside of the Zcash Community Advisory Panel (ZCAP), a group of volunteers with extensive interest and/or knowledge of the Zcash ecosystem. On-chain voting and coin-holder voting has been discussed for future consensus-gathering mechanisms.
Read more about the trademark agreement.
Three organizations receive issuance from a Zcash development fund, which totals 20 percent of mining rewards. The other 80 percent of Zcash issuance is distributed to miners.
(~40% of the dev fund)
Zcash Community Grants (formerly ZOMG) distributes funding to independent, third-party developers for their work on Zcash-related projects.
(~35% of the dev fund)
ECC, a subsidiary of nonprofit Bootstrap Project, launched Zcash in 2016 and continues to support it through R&D, engineering, regulatory relations, adoption and demand generation.
(~25% of the dev fund)
The Zcash Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity that builds financial privacy infrastructure for the public good, primarily serving the users of the Zcash protocol and blockchain.
In addition to Zcash Community Grants, community platforms and initiatives provide Incentives for developers and teams to fix bugs, increase efficiency, improve UX, pitch ideas, and build out applications.
As a protocol, Zcash is governed by the Zcash Improvement Proposal process. The ZIP process provides an open venue and structure for collectively evaluating changes to Zcash.
Anyone can submit a draft ZIP. Draft ZIPs are debated by the community at large, then accepted or rejected by the ZIP editors. Currently there are two ZIP editors — Daira Hopwood represents the Electric Coin Company and Deirdre Connolly represents the Zcash Foundation.
Decisions from the ZIP process are written into the Zcash specification, as well as the software that runs the network. The changes are “ratified” on-chain when the majority of the network adopts the upgrade and doesn’t break consensus.
We encourage community contributions and decentralization of work on the Zcash protocol. The process for proposing and creating a new ZIP is documented in ZIP 0 at the link below.
Zcash is cash
for a new era.