As announced by the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the results of the community vote on the mining reward fee for financing Zcash’s development have been released:
We're thrilled to accept this role as offered by the #Zcash community. https://t.co/KiBftckTaN#ZcashDevFund $ZEC
— Electric Coin Co. (@ElectricCoinCo) January 28, 2020
The community has expressed itself positively on this issue and this will lead to the creation of a new fund which will consist of a percentage of the miners’ rewards, which means that they will receive less during this operation.
The fund will take 20% of the miners’ reward and will be distributed as follows:
- 35% will go to ECC;
- 25% will go to the Zcash Foundation;
- 40% will go to third party support and efforts.
This will not start immediately but will coincide with the next and first halving of the Zcash blockchain that will take place in the fall of this year, and each fund of the relative branch will be capped at $700 thousand per month, as stated in the ZIP1014.
Moreover, this change will not affect users’ privacy when managing dedicated procedures since nothing will have to be done on the user side, and it will not change the monetary issuance curve because the rewards remain unchanged, only a part of them will be moved into this fund.
This is a considerable success and it shows how, if the community is involved, it is possible to sacrifice a part of the rewards in order to be able to keep the blockchain going. Whereas with regards to the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain, a similar proposal was withdrawn because, although the fee percentage would have been lower, it would have led to a quite significant centralization situation which would have jeopardized the entire blockchain with the risk of forks being created, as well as in terms of regulation because even the SEC could have intervened.
All that remains to be seen now is how the situation will evolve after the halving and whether this will not represent a possible solution that could also be adopted by other blockchains, which, in order to raise funds to move forward with their projects, may decide to include such a fee on the miners’ rewards.
