Zcash holders to be polled on removing 50,000 ZEC from the grants treasury

A draft Zcash (ZEC) proposal that would have Zcash Community Grants (ZCG), the committee that funds development grants, remove 50,000 ZEC from circulation was merged into the project's proposals repository on November 11, 2026. Coinholders and community panels will be polled on the network's development funding from November 16 to November 30, according to the timeline published by the organizers.

What the 50,000 ZEC proposal says

The draft was written by Sean Bowe of Tachyon Group and Zooko Wilcox and Jason McGee of Shielded Labs. It is a draft Zcash Improvement Proposal, the format the project uses for protocol and governance changes, and has no number yet. It has two parts.

First, the ZCG committee "SHALL cause 50,000 ZEC of the funds it administers to be removed from circulation," the text says, no later than 30 days after the proposal activates on the network. The removed coins would be credited to the Network Sustainability Mechanism. Under the draft, ZEC removed this way comes back into circulation through future block rewards. Part of that mechanism was included in the NU7 network upgrade, according to the upgrade's specification.

Second, ZCG would stop receiving its 8% share of newly issued ZEC, which the draft puts at 144 ZEC a day. From activation until the network's third halving, at block height 6,132,390, that share would go into a new "Future Dev and Legal Defense Fund Lockbox." The draft says that "no disbursement mechanism is currently defined for this lockbox," so a later proposal would have to decide how the money can be spent.

ZCG would keep the rest of its treasury. The separate fund controlled by coinholders would be unchanged.

ZCG's treasury and the draft's runway figures

ZCG is a five-member committee that awards grants to developers, wallets, and community projects, and on November 3 it dropped an earlier plan of its own to redirect about 98,000 ZEC toward mining rewards, according to CoinDesk.

The draft cites ZCG's own dashboard, which showed 91,452.98 ZEC and about $8.8 million held in dollars, against about $2.4 million of outstanding grant commitments, as of October 21. It adds that those figures have not been independently reconciled.

The authors' argument is that the rise in ZEC's price has made the treasury much larger in dollar terms than the committee's spending. The draft assumes a price of $1,300 per ZEC and spending of about $9.4 million a year, a figure it reaches by doubling the expenses reported for the first half of 2026. On those assumptions, it calculates that the treasury, net of outstanding grant commitments, would cover 13.3 years of spending before the removal and 6.4 years after it. ZEC fell below $1,000 on November 11, under the price the draft assumes, and traded at $986.97 at 07:19 UTC on November 12, CoinGecko data shows. At that price, 50,000 ZEC was worth about $49.3 million.

How the poll works

Five organizations that coordinate Zcash's coinholder voting (Project Tachyon, Shielded Labs, Valar Group, the Zcash Foundation, and ZODL) set the timeline in a forum post on November 5. Polls for coinholders and community panels open on November 16 and close on Monday, November 30, at 23:59 UTC. The organizers said that, if there is rough consensus on a proposal, they will support a network upgrade called NU 7.1 to carry it out. The post sets no numerical threshold for that consensus.

The draft is not the only option. Its text names two other drafts, one that would end ZCG's funding stream in favor of the Network Sustainability Mechanism and one that would wind ZCG down, and says they are alternatives where they overlap. The editors of the proposals repository said on the pull request that they accepted this set of governance proposals for polling but will keep a general block on future ones. Draft poll questions posted in the same forum thread on November 10 list five questions, each with the answers support, oppose, or abstain: this proposal, the wind-down of ZCG, a proposal called the Zcash Adoption Pool, keeping ZCG's existing funding and operations, and cutting the target block time from 25 to 20 seconds.

What it could mean for traders

In our assessment, two things would change if the proposal were adopted and activated. The 50,000 ZEC would leave circulating supply and, under the draft, come back into circulation through future block rewards, and the coins ZCG now receives each day would sit in a fund that cannot be spent until a further proposal sets the rules. Neither is certain: the poll does not itself change the protocol, the draft sets no activation height, and any change needs a network upgrade that developers and miners would still have to deliver.

The risk we see is on the funding side. A smaller treasury gives the grants committee less room if the price of ZEC falls, and the draft's runway figures depend on its $1,300 price assumption.

What happens next

The poll questions were still a draft when we checked on November 12: the account that posted them said on November 11 that a revised version would follow the next day, and no revised or final one had been posted in the thread. The post with the draft questions asked for comments before November 15. Polls open on November 16, and the organizers have said they will publish the results shortly after the polls close on November 30.