Zcash 95 Million USD Dev Fund Should Be Its Last, Says Dragonfly Qureshi Inside the Fight Over Who Controls It After 2028

Zcash is facing the most consequential governance fight in its history, and it is happening because the privacy coin’s development fund has simply become too valuable.

By Diego Rivera | September 19, 2026

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, argued in a Friday post on X that the Zcash development fund — a pool of tokens set aside from every block reward to pay the engineers who maintain the network — should be wound down for good when the current arrangement expires under existing rules in 2028. “I’m of the opinion that this should be the final Dev Fund,” Qureshi wrote. His reasoning: the fund is already large enough to finish the remaining technical work, and its sheer size now makes it a political target.

A War Chest Worth 95 Million USD — and Growing

The numbers explain the tension. According to ZecStats, the dev fund — sometimes called the “lockbox” — held 63,962 ZEC at press time, worth roughly 95 million USD, with Qureshi warning it risks being “politicized” as it approaches 100 million USD in value.

Why did a funding pool balloon this large? Because Zcash’s price exploded. ZEC has rallied hard since August, driven by institutional interest in privacy assets, and every coin parked in the lockbox became more valuable overnight. The fund receives 0.1875 ZEC per block, which represents 12 percent of the total block subsidy under the network’s NU6 upgrade — think of it as a mandatory 12 percent “development tax” on every block reward that miners receive.

• 63,962 ZEC — the fund’s current balance, about 95 million USD at press time
• 12 percent — share of every block subsidy diverted to the dev fund under NU6
• 2028 — the year the current dev fund arrangement expires
• 40 percent — the share of the fund controlled by the Zcash Community Grants Committee, per founder Zooko Wilcox

The Core Conflict: Wind It Down or Protect It?

Qureshi’s call did not go unanswered. Matt Huang, founder of Paradigm — the firm whose reported investment helped ignite the ZEC rally — argued in a Wednesday post that the fund matters more, not less, “in this age of AI cyber capabilities” and rapid progress in quantum computing. In other words: the threats are getting scarier, so defunding the developers who defend the network is the wrong move.

The debate has split into three camps. Qureshi wants the fund to end after 2028 and opposes handing control to “pure token holder voting,” though he supports a partial model in which holders elect temporary councils. Huang agrees that pure token-holder governance could introduce “unpredictability that could limit long-term trust as a monetary asset” and favors a hybrid. And Maxime Desalle, an investment analyst at Winklevoss Capital, went furthest of all, suggesting the community “completely get rid” of the dev fund — arguing in a September 9 post that it may actually hurt Zcash’s security while recreating “the dependencies and bureaucracies that many welfare states suffer from.”

Meanwhile, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox has pushed back from another direction. In a September 1 post, he credited the Zcash Community Grants Committee as one of the main reasons Zcash “has survived and grown to where it is today,” later clarifying on September 14 that the committee administers about 40 percent of the fund.

What This Means for Your Wallet

If you own ZEC — or are watching the privacy-coin rally from the sidelines — this matters for a simple reason: who controls 95 million USD of development money shapes what Zcash becomes. A fund that winds down in 2028 could mean slower upgrades and fewer paid developers, but also less political infighting over an increasingly juicy treasury. A fund that survives could keep the engineering pipeline strong, at the cost of the governance drama now playing out in public.

There is also a supply angle. The lockbox balance sits outside circulating supply until governance disbursements release it. A decision to distribute, burn, or gradually spend those 63,962 ZEC could shift the effective supply picture for a coin whose price has already been on a historic run. For context, the broader market backdrop remains risk-on, with Bitcoin trading around 81,000 USD per the latest snapshot.

The timing is awkward by design: Zcash holders recently backed the NU7 upgrade path — including faster 25-second blocks, targeted for a November mainnet activation — in a community poll, showing the governance process can still move. The dev fund question is a harder, more political test of that same process.

The Verdict

Nothing gets decided this week — the current fund runs until 2028, and the debate is only beginning. But the lines are drawn: venture capitalists want an end date, Paradigm wants protection against AI-era and quantum threats, and the founder is defending the institution that kept the project alive. For a coin whose value proposition is privacy and predictability, how Zcash resolves a very public fight over 95 million USD will tell investors plenty about its long-term credibility as a monetary asset.

The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.