Dragonfly’s Qureshi calls for Zcash development fund to end around 2028

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, is drawing a line in the sand on Zcash’s development funding. His position: keep the fund alive until its scheduled expiration around November 2028, finish the remaining technical work, then shut it down for good.

The timing matters because ZEC’s recent price rally has quietly turned a routine funding mechanism into a much larger pot of money, and that scale is starting to make people uncomfortable.

A fund that outgrew its own assumptions

Zcash’s post-NU6 funding model splits protocol-directed revenue into two buckets: an 8% allocation to Zcash Community Grants and a 12% lockbox. The effective value of the development fund has now surpassed $95 million, and Qureshi flagged publicly on September 18 that crossing the $100 million threshold would invite a different class of problem: institutionalization and politicization of decisions that were supposed to be technical.

Dragonfly holds ZEC, so Qureshi’s position is not purely academic. He disclosed his investment in the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) alongside his comments, which puts him on both sides of the debate as a stakeholder with skin in the outcome.

The technical checklist Zcash still needs to finish

Qureshi laid out three specific workstreams that Zcash needs to complete before the fund can responsibly close. The first is Tachyon, a performance upgrade to the core protocol. The second is quantum resistance, an increasingly urgent consideration as cryptographic assumptions that seemed permanent start looking fragile. The third is formal verification methods designed to defend against AI-driven attack vectors.

Qureshi estimates they require one to two more years of focused development, which maps neatly onto the 2028 expiration date.

His framing for the end state is pointed: Zcash should reach what he calls “protocol solidification,” a condition where the network’s identity converges with Bitcoin’s as a store of value rather than an evolving platform.

ZODL, governance, and who gets to decide

ZODL closed a $25 million seed round in March 2026, with Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Coinbase Ventures all participating. The organization is privately funded and does not receive direct allocations from the Zcash development fund.

On governance, Qureshi’s preference runs against the grain of most crypto community orthodoxy. He argued for limiting coinholder input in favor of committee oversight, the logic being that policy stability matters more than direct democratic participation when the decisions involved are deeply technical.

Zcash’s community is unlikely to resolve that tension before Zcon7, where the funding model’s implications are expected to dominate discussion in October 2026.

Qureshi is not arguing for permanent committee control. He is arguing that for the next two years, the people best positioned to finish specific technical tasks should not be distracted or overruled by funding politics. After 2028, the question becomes moot because the fund closes.

What the ZEC rally changes

When ZEC’s price rises, the percentage-based funding allocations produce more dollars without any change to the rules. A fund designed around lower price assumptions becomes a much larger institution at higher prices.

Qureshi’s call for a clean 2028 sunset is partly a preemptive move against that scenario. If the community agrees to treat 2028 as a genuine deadline rather than a soft expiration that can be extended, it reduces the incentive for actors to entrench themselves in the funding apparatus now.

The Zcon7 discussions will be a meaningful signal. If the community coalesces around the finite-fund model, it could reinforce confidence that Zcash’s development trajectory has a defined end point rather than an indefinite dependency on protocol-directed revenue.