What Does Crypto Care if Zooko Is a Millionaire?

2,033 ZEC. That's how much Zooko Wilcox, CEO of the Zcash Company, earns per month from the $650 million zcash cryptocurrency network he helped create.

Still, while the specifics of Wilcox's salary were not widely known, what was previously public was that in the zcash code is what's called a "Founders reward," a portion of the code that allocates 20 percent of the ZEC generated by mining to company stakeholders.

Revealed Tuesday, Wilcox's $3.65 million annual salary accounts for 0.9 percent of the overall founder fee reward - the further 19.1 percent is split up between the Zcash Foundation, the Zcash Company and 44 other founders, investors, and advisors, with 80 percent of the total issuance going to miners.

Still, over the past two years, the Zcash Company has used the reward to improve its tech, making the previously unwieldy shielded transactions small enough so that they can compete with transparency.

"Is zcash an open-source product or the software product of a company? Answer is it's both." Wilcox said at a fireside chat on Wednesday.

"The reason you can rely on the privacy of shielded addresses is because it's open-source software, that's what protects your privacy, it's not because you're trusting the Zcash Company," Wilcox said.

Formed last year, the largest recipient of the founders reward, largely from donations by Wilcox himself, is the Zcash Foundation, an independent entity that is intended to off-load decision-making and development efforts.

According to Baldet, the founders reward is an innovative incentive scheme, because it binds both developers in the Zcash Company and coin holders to supporting the network, or what Wilcox calls "Shared fate."

Whereas the reward structure in zcash is stark, Carter said he had embarked on research on various cryptocurrencies and startups last year, trying to glean information on the financial breakdown of the networks, and found little data.

"The zcash community is starting to take the decisions about the future of zcash so they all need to know the relevant facts," Wilcox said.