Winklevoss Twins Call to End Zcash (ZEC) Grants Committee Over $125M Treasury

Cameron Winklevoss: “Its Mission Is Privacy”

Cameron Winklevoss wants Zcash to stop treating governance as an experiment and hand funding decisions straight to its holders. Writing on X on Friday, October 30, the Gemini cofounder argued that stakeholder voting has disciplined capital markets for centuries and that coinholder voting is simply its onchain form, so the protocol has no reason to “re-invent the governance wheel.” He reduced the project’s purpose to a single line, “its mission is privacy,” and placed the design of grant committees outside it. Privacy, in his telling, means the shielded payments the network has offered since launch, a design anchored by the trusted setup of the Zcash Ceremony. The post closes with the demand now splitting the community: “It’s time to end ZCG.” The target is Zcash Community Grants, the committee that controls 8% of block rewards for Zcash ecosystem development. Its members choose which outside teams get funded, a power the twins say no ZEC holder ever voted to grant. His brother Tyler added his voice the same day, accusing the committee of operating without sufficient accountability and of leaving ZEC holders no say over its spending. The intervention lands inside a fight over a treasury that Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe recently valued at more than $125 million, drawn from ZEC holdings and outstanding grant commitments. It also lands with the Zcash price near $1,317 after the network’s ten-year mark. That rally has attracted large short positions from big traders in perpetual futures, a tension our whale shorts coverage tracked while the coin held above $1,200, with levels mapped in our Zcash technical analysis.

A “Slush Fund With No Accountability”

Tyler’s case against the committee runs through mining. In an October 30 reply to community developer Vini Barbosa, he argued that comparing ZCG to mining is either intellectually dishonest or intellectually illiterate. Miners, in his words, are the “Man in the Arena,” and mining is the purest market-based competition imaginable: they commit their own capital and machines, from specialized hardware to a full blockchain node, and their earnings track how well they help verify and secure the network. Committee members, he wrote, approve grants without facing comparable financial risk when the projects they back fail to deliver. He called ZCG a “slush fund with no accountability,” alleged its structure invites poor spending decisions and conflicts of interest, and questioned the absence of coinholder oversight, fiduciary duties and consequences for unsuccessful picks. His conclusion was blunt: the network would run fine without ZCG, so the committee should be dissolved. Barbosa had defended the program in response to Tyler’s October 27 comments, arguing that a development fund is neither charity nor foreign aid, and that grants legitimately finance projects benefiting the network much as mining rewards finance security. Tyler rejected the analogy: mining rewards flow through measurable competition, grant approvals depend on committee discretion. The flashpoint was a $550,000 outreach proposal approved in August. The ZECsy initiative promised appearances at adult industry conventions, cryptocurrency conferences and educational workshops aimed at people facing banking restrictions, and the committee approved roughly $461,500 for its first nine monthly milestones, with progress and spending reports required. Supporters saw a way to reach communities that need financial privacy; critics doubted the spending would produce lasting adoption. Bowe’s October 27 proposal calls for redirecting the committee’s 8% share of block subsidies to the Network Sustainability Mechanism, with existing grant obligations honored and the coinholder-directed program’s 12% left intact. Our earlier report laid out the Network Sustainability Reserve plan. No change has been approved, and the reallocation would need a future network upgrade.

The September Vote Record

The record coinholders have already set gives the twins’ argument something to stand on. In September, 2.18 million ZEC, about 10.4% of the 21 million maximum supply, took part in the Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants vote, approving $8.39 million across 17 of 37 proposals for security research, protocol work and wallet infrastructure. That is direct voting, closer to a shareholder proxy than to delegated proof of stake, and it met a 420,000 ZEC quorum with a simple majority. Grayscale research head Zach Pandl, in an October 27 report, credited a decade of this developer funding with sustaining protocol work through weak token markets. The catch is scope: retroactive voting pays for finished work, while ZCG’s discretionary 8% funds what comes next. A new round opens for proposals today, October 30, and closes November 13, with voting set for December 17 to 29, giving holders the next on-record chance to weigh in.