Zcash Pays Off Angry Developer to Avoid Blockchain Split

In a forum post published Tuesday, the sole maintainer of the Windows zcash wallet software, D. Jane Mercer, said he was going to cease development of the clients and release a zcash competitor "Rebranded as another coin," if he didn't get further funding for his work.

That's because the Overwinter upgrade is scheduled to activate on June 25, but more importantly, that upgrade only adds limited features to zcash's protocol in an effort to prepare it for the Sapling hard fork upgrade, which looks to make zcash more scalable and private, in October.

If Mercer stopped development on the Windows wallet software, the most popular zcash wallet software, "Tens to hundreds of thousands of users" would have been left without a workable wallet after the Sapling upgrade.

The zcash community quickly stepped to financially support the developer after the threat - at least for a little while.

The amount donated to Mercer by several anonymous zcash addresses is currently at 80 ZEC, around $15,360, according to current metrics.

Zcash isn't able to support multiple iterations of the protocol, even if, after Overwinter, it will.

While zcash developers were quick to counter that, saying that after Overwinter, older versions of the software will just be pushed into "Safety mode," which causes those versions to deprecate at some point without causing a chain split, Mercer still had the community in a tight spot.

Still the episode has sparked an important conversation between Mercer and the Zcash Foundation - one that other cryptocurrency communities should be clued into as well - about how crucial independent developers are to these protocols and how to best compensate them for their work.

The Zcash Foundation, which hard-coded in a so-called "Founder's fee" that contributes a small percentage of each transaction to the founders fund, has a recurring grant program.

On a forum, executive director of the Zcash Foundation Josh Cincinnati said the organization is open to researching other funding methods as well.