Zcash’s shielded pool activity has surged to its highest weekly level in more than four years, while a governance battle over the project’s development fund intensifies. According to data shared by Messari, 62,812 private transactions were recorded in the past week, a level beaten only during three weeks around the summer 2022 peak. The increase signals renewed demand for privacy-preserving payments even as the token’s price takes a breather after a sharp September climb.
ZEC cooled from a year-to-date peak near $1,590 to roughly $1,430, but buyers defended the area above $1,440, leaving weekly performance strong among large-cap crypto assets. Institutional interest remains visible through Grayscale’s Zcash ETF, which launched in late August and is preparing a 3-for-1 share split to lower the per-share price without altering total exposure.
The larger debate concerns the Zcash Development Fund, which currently receives 12% of the block subsidy under NU6 rules, or 0.1875 ZEC per block. ZecStats put the fund’s balance at 63,962 ZEC, worth about $95 million. Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi argued in a September 17 post that Zcash has chosen an identity as “encrypted Bitcoin” and should eventually ossify into a dependable store of value. He said the fund was justified when private capital would not support development, but after the price rally it risks becoming politicized, adding that work on Tachyon, quantum resistance, and formal verification against AI-driven attacks is not finished. Qureshi concluded the community should keep the fund long enough to complete that technical work and then wind it down.
Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang took a different view, calling an inflation-backed developer pool an elegant way to pay for public goods given rising AI and quantum risk, while sharing Qureshi’s caution about unfiltered coin voting. Winklevoss Capital analyst Maxime Desalle went further, arguing the subsidy weakens miner incentives and recreates grant-seeking politics, and Naval Ravikant criticized off-chain community stewardship as a trusted-third-party problem. The dispute is therefore not only about the 2028 expiry but whether Zcash remains a protocol with a standing treasury or becomes a scarcer, more ossified asset.
