Vitalik Buterin: ‘Dark Hand’ of Token Voting Could Erode Zcash Privacy

Zcash’s governance debate resurfaced over the past week after a routine election endorsement drew sharp responses from prominent industry figures.

The discussion centers on whether the privacy coin should keep its committee-based system or shift to direct tokenholder voting.

Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox opened discussions by urging support for Artkor, a long-time Zcash community member and sitting member of the Zcash Community Grants Committee (ZCG), where he seeks re-election for the next year.

Zcash’s off-chain governance operates through a curated advisory panel called ZCAP which votes on major questions and elects the committee that allocates grants (ZCG). Wilcox describes the group as “thoughtful and independent people who disagree with each other but are committed to the same mission.”

By Saturday, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant had entered the thread and challenged the model.

“It’s an obsolete system and should be deprecated,” Ravikant opined, adding that “trusted” third parties “are a security flaw and it doesn’t matter if they are ‘thoughtful and independent.”

All governance for decentralized protocols “should be on-chain and private,” Ravikant said.

Vitalik weighs in

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin then weighed in and urged the community not to adopt a coin-voting model.

Buterin said he hopes Zcash “resists the dark hand of token voting,” arguing that the cryptocurrency’s privacy focus could “erode over time” if left to the “median token voter.”

To him, “token voting is bad in all kinds of ways” and “worse than Zcash’s status quo,” citing a 2021 blog post.

“Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral: anyone can go and get some units of the governance token on Uniswap,” Buterin wrote at the time, adding that, “In practice, however, coin voting may well only appear secure today precisely because of the imperfections in its neutrality.”

Buterin argued that simple coin-weighted voting concentrates power among large holders and pushes protocols toward short-term, price-driven decisions.

The price of success

Price has become a concern among the Zcash community, with Artkor noting in his re-election post that “the price context has changed significantly.”

The surge in Zcash’s coin, ZEC, over the past month, has “undoubtedly” created new opportunities for its community, Artkor noted.

“But at the same time, it also creates new dangerous challenges. The danger is not that we can spend more, but that we can start spending more easily. You know, it’s like a test of faith with money,” he wrote.

Supporters of the current system lean on the idea that a vetted committee provides continuity and filters proposals responsibly. Critics, however, see a structure that could concentrate influence.

“Token-based voting can expose protocols to governance capture if a well-funded actor accumulates a controlling share of tokens,” Lucien Bourdon, analyst at Trezor, told Decrypt. “While the likelihood of such events depends on the asset’s liquidity and distribution, the risk persists.”

Token voting “often correlates influence with wealth, which may not always align with long-term network sustainability or community values,” Bourdon added.

Such factors could depend on the community, Bourdon observed. While token voting could increase “engagement and decentralize control,” it could also open the door “to low-information decision-making and manipulation.”

“Well-chosen and trusted” committees may provide more consistent governance—but they risk “becoming detached from the broader user base,” he said, adding that, “Neither model is perfect; the most resilient systems often blend accountability with mechanisms to prevent capture.”

At the time of writing, ZEC is down roughly 23% on the day, per CoinGecko data, following a wider market tumble that saw the total crypto market cap drop below $3 trillion on Monday.

Decrypt has reached out to the Zcash Foundation for comment.