Dragonfly Partner: Zcash currently still needs a development fund, but it should terminate after the protocol is solidified

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi commented on the controversy surrounding the Zcash development fund, stating that the Zcash community has positioned itself as "the crypto version of Bitcoin" and has refused to continue adding more features to the protocol. To become a reliable store of value, Zcash ultimately needs to achieve protocol finality, but it still needs to advance Tachyon, quantum resistance, and comprehensive formal verification required to address AI network attacks, making it unsuitable for finality in the next one to two years.

The development fund has played a necessary role during the phase of lacking private funding to support Zcash development, and under current rules, it will expire in 2028. However, as the price of ZEC has surged significantly, the scale of the fund has expanded by an order of magnitude; once the fund exceeds 100 million dollars, it will inevitably move towards institutionalization and face the risk of the allocation mechanism being politicized.

He advocates for the continued retention of the development fund at this stage to complete the remaining technical work before protocol finality, but this round should be the last round of the development fund. Once Zcash meets the conditions for finality, the fund should gradually wind down rather than continue seeking new funding projects; future development needs can be spontaneously funded by holders and ecosystem supporters, similar to Bitcoin.

In terms of governance, Haseeb does not support voting solely by token holders, believing that a store of value asset requires policy predictability, and pure token governance is too volatile. He supports limited participation by holders and believes that committee governance, while flawed, may be a more feasible solution. Haseeb also disclosed that Dragonfly holds ZEC and that he himself is a ZODL investor, but ZODL will not directly benefit from the development fund.