We are proud to launch the Zcoin Crowdfunding System (ZCS) as a key step in decentralizing funding and decision making of the project.

We elaborated its plans to further decentralize the project and remove any single point of failure in our recent post.The ZCS  is intended to serve as a transition from funding directly from the block reward to a donation model and shall begin funding ancillary tasks such as non-core development, third party integrations and community management and events.

The ZCS allows any community members to propose, approve and fund activities. Anyone can submit an idea for a feature, task or service for discussion and once it reaches sufficient interest, it is approved for donators to start funding it. Funds are then released according to the milestones specified along with regular updates of the progress of the project. The ZCS utilizes Zcoin’s Github for transparency so that there is a trackable history of all proposals and its amendments.

As a privacy project, decentralization is essential for long term sustainability which includes governance and funding. While a block reward has served us well in building the foundations of Zcoin it can result in over-reliance on the core team. We have looked at many funding models including decentralized treasuries where proposals are voted base on stake but these often result in plutocracies. ZCS draws from the good example set by the Monero CCS and also shows that competing privacy projects can complement one another including drawing inspiration from each other and collaborating in research.

We are hopeful that the ZCS will result in increased community participation in the project by allowing a streamlined way to seek funding.

Special thanks to Diego “rehrar” Salazar and Xiphon for their amazing work on porting the CCS for this.

There are already a few proposals up for discussion and we hope to see more!

In Ideas (Discussion stage)

Funding Completed