ZEC dump by 20% after yet another governance drama in crypto. The entire team led by ECC CEO @jswihart resigned after "employment were changed in ways that made it impossible for us to perform our duties." The core issue seems to be $35m USD in ZEC locked so the dev team team cannot access funding to push the protocol forward. You see, Zcash isn't like Bitcoin that's solidified and is hard to change. Zcash is still being built so for that purpose ZEC has a 'Dev tax' (12% of mining rewards) that funded the ECC and Foundation. In late 2024, that model ended and the community voted to move that 12% cut into a Lockbox. It's a vault that freezes the funds until a a governance decides on a new distribution model. You can see in every block tx 0.1875 ZEC going into that lockbox. The problem is that governance keeps failing to agree what to do with that money. In Aug 2024, Josh Swihart proposed "zBloc" model to unlock the funds for builders. The Bootstrap Board (which controlled ECC and from which the dev team resigned ) + Zcash founder Zooko seem to have blocked it. Zooko also wrote in support of the Bootstrap Board's 'exceptionally high integrity' after the resignation post thus the situation is indeed complex. So the dev team basically rage-quit and will try to spin off their own company to build for zcash. As an investor, these civil wars suck so I hope they can resolve the funding and disagreement issues ASAP. Without it, ZEC attractiveness as 'insurance to BTC' is put at risk.(Ignas | DeFi)