Zcash (ZEC) Lobby Group PGPZ Registers With LDA, Backed by $750,000 Grant

PGPZ Enters Washington

The paperwork landed first, and it says plenty about the shift: Pretty Good Policy for Zcash (PGPZ), the dedicated lobbying group of the Zcash (ZEC) ecosystem, completed its registration with the United States lobbying disclosure regime and began operating on Thursday, October 1. The LDA registration filing names Divij Pandya, a former crypto policy official, as the sole registered lobbyist of record, and it sets out a short, deliberate agenda: the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, plus two digital asset tax reform proposals that the document lists without titles. Registration is the opening procedural step under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the 1995 statute that obliges any group lobbying federal officials to disclose who it represents, who lobbies and on which issues; quarterly expense reports follow once activity begins. Funding comes from inside the Zcash ecosystem itself. The Zcash Community Grants program approved a $750,000 first-year grant for PGPZ in August, per the application published on the Zcash community forum, an allocation that covers lobbying fees, policy research, congressional outreach and public advocacy. That money did not come from the standing budgets of Electric Coin Co. or the Zcash development foundation; it passed through a community proposal vote, which means Zcash stakeholders themselves signed off on paying for representation in Washington. The timing matters. The Zcash price has returned to the center of market attention in recent months, and our live monitoring shows the spot price 3.2% higher over the past 24 hours. Privacy networks have historically had no funded voice in the capital where their regulatory fate is decided; as of today, Zcash does, with its first-year budget fixed at three quarters of a million dollars. Quarterly disclosure of that spending will give outsiders a running measure of how hard the privacy sector is pushing, a data series the market has never had for a privacy asset.

From PGPC to a Zcash-Only Lobby

PGPZ did not appear from nothing. The group was created in June of this year as an independent successor to Pretty Good Policy for Crypto, the advocacy effort Electric Coin Co. launched in 2022. That earlier operation spent its Washington years hosting policy roundtables and organizing a congressional briefing that walked lawmakers through how cryptocurrency technology actually works. Splitting into a Zcash-only body shifts the strategy from industry-wide advocacy to a single-project mandate for the Zcash ecosystem, a change the registration itself reflects. Co-founder Paul Brigner, chief policy and regulatory officer at ZODL, the Zcash development foundation, framed the mission on X as ensuring Zcash has “rigorous, organized and credible” policy participation, adding that lawmakers are deciding whether private digital cash can exist, be used legally and serve the public interest. That framing places Zcash in direct conversation with the argument over a central bank digital currency, a state-issued instrument whose privacy trade-offs mirror those of Zcash's shielded transactions, which rest on a trusted cryptographic setup known as the Zcash Ceremony. The Clarity Act, introduced in 2023, is the bill the ecosystem has tied its future to: it would draw a hard line between SEC and CFTC oversight of digital assets and establish a registration framework with compliance guidance for participants moving between crypto and traditional finance. The two tax proposals in the filing carry no names, but drafts circulating in Washington touch an annual reporting exemption below $10,000 and income recognition standards for DeFi, terms that shape compliance costs for crypto exchange users and privacy-coin holders alike. Protocol development runs on a parallel clock: the NU7 upgrade, which carries the Tachyon extension layer and 25-second block targets, is expected on mainnet in November, with NU7 testnet activation scheduled for Tuesday, October 6. ETF flows, which had helped push Zcash back into market focus in recent months, have since cooled, with Grayscale's Zcash fund logging a $93.6 million first weekly outflow.

The Clarity Act Carries the Weight

Our read of the primary document, rather than the coverage around it, is that the filing is deliberately narrow: one client, one lobbyist, three legislative items and a quarterly reporting duty that binds PGPZ and Pandya for as long as the lobbying activity continues. The provision doing the most work is the first one listed, the Clarity Act itself. It is a bill, not an enacted law, and its jurisdictional line between the SEC and the CFTC would determine which regulator, and therefore which rulebook, a privacy network answers to. If it stalls in Congress, the two tax proposals become PGPZ's fallback; if either shields privacy users, the $750,000 grant will have bought a seat Zcash did not previously have.