Zcash’s leading development team, Electric Coin Company (ECC), will now be a wholly-owned property of the Bootstrap Project, a new non-profit company. The owners of Zerocoin Electric Coin Company LLC agreed to donate the whole ECC project to Bootstrap in preparation for the upcoming Zcash (ZEC) blockchain network upgrade, Canopy, activation expected next month.
Bootstrap Project is a non-profit company, operating kind-like a shell company overlooking the ECC project and development progress. According to the officially published post on its launch, Bootstrap aims to
“uplift humanity through technology, scientific discovery, education and human organization.”
After the acquisition by Bootstrap is complete – the final vote is set to be made official later this month – ECC will retain its structure from management, employees, and operations. Only the shareholders are set to change with the acquisition.
“Bootstrap’s initial Board of Directors will be identical to ECC’s current Board, and will be the seed for a “self-perpetuating” board that decides its own composition,” the statement reads.
“The initial Board members will expand the Board by the end of 2021 at the very latest, to bring a wider diversity of stakeholders, demographics, and expertise”.
According to the post, ECC founders’ donation to Bootstrap is set to improve the operations on the platform aiming to provide the best of both worlds – as a startup and a fully-fledged organization. This allows ECC to operate like a startup in overall product development, customer operations, and commercial activities. Notwithstanding, like Bootstrap, ECC will focus on scaling up its projects to serve the wider public.
As it stands, the ECC founders, responsible for developing the privacy protocols on Zcash, receive 5% of the mining rewards, but this is set to change with the launch of Canopy. The network upgrade will increase this figure to 7% mining rewards paid to the Bootstrap Project and distributed to the ECC developers.
The donation to Bootstrap is a testament to Zcash and ECC’s goal of decentralization to keep the regulators at bay. Speaking to Coindesk, Zooko Wilcox, founder of ECC, stated the move to a non-profit organization is in tandem with the community’s policies – decentralization being key to this.
