Haseeb Qureshi Says Zcash Should Keep Development Fund Until Protocol Freeze

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi said the Zcash community has positioned the project as a crypto version of Bitcoin and does not want to add more features to the protocol. According to ChainCatcher, he said Zcash still needs to complete Tachyon, quantum resistance, and broader formal verification to defend against AI network attacks, making protocol freeze unsuitable for the next one to two years. Qureshi said the development fund was necessary when private funding for Zcash development was limited, and under current rules it is set to expire in 2028. He added that as ZEC has risen sharply, the fund has grown by an order of magnitude, and once it exceeds $100 million, it will inevitably become institutionalized and face the risk of politicized grant allocation. He argued that the fund should remain in place for now to finish the remaining technical work before protocol freeze, but said this round should be the last development fund. After Zcash reaches the conditions for freeze, the fund should be phased out rather than used to seek new grant programs, with future development funding coming voluntarily from holders and ecosystem supporters, similar to Bitcoin. On governance, Qureshi said he does not support full token-holder voting, arguing that a store-of-value asset needs predictable policy and that pure token governance is too volatile. He said limited holder participation is acceptable and that committee governance, despite its flaws, may be the more workable option. He also disclosed that Dragonfly holds ZEC and that he is an investor in ZODL, though ZODL will not directly benefit from the development fund.