I'm writing this in my personal capacity not as community manager and my experience as a lawyer and this is to answer the accusation that founders are just swimming in their founder's reward. This is not based on any inside info but my own deductions. For marketing, although i'm not privy to how they spend it, you can see the ads that are popping up on Zcoin so there's some marketing ad spend going on there.
But let's get into the nitty gritty which I think a lot of people are not thinking clearly about.
First of all, Roger Ver's investment is real. It has been disclosed
EXPLICITLY in bitcoin.com publications (which Roger owns), confirmed by other independent members approaching him directly, regularly posts on his MemoryDealers account in Reddit in Zcoin and created a sub-forum for it in Bitcoin forums. He still remains invested.
https://news.bitcoin.com/zero-knowledge-zcoin-launching-soon/ (see the disclaimer)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZCoinProject/First of all there were definitely certain agreements in place when obtaining investor funding for Zcoin (or as it was then named Moneta). This is what made the project possible in the first place.
It is common for these investors to choose to remain anonymous. Only Roger has stepped forward to confirm he is an investor but I don't think you can blame the founders for not disclosing the others especially since the investors are the one who funded Zcoin and their wishes should be respected. Note that backing a privacy coin can be controversial and not everyone may want to come forward. With Zcash, which is a much more high profile investment with serious marketing dollar, there's bound to be more investors who are willing to be public.
Now to the next point, I think it's naive to think that these investors didn't have certain stakes in the growth and reward of the coin. They need a return on their investment. With no premine, there's the founder's reward. The most logical thing is to assume that some investors are entitled to certain payouts. The whole project started when it was Moneta in 2015 and much time has passed and only about one month back was it launched. Now that a milestone has been achieved (coin launch and listing), some investors may want to recoup part of their investment back while others decide to hold. Where would this payout come from? It may be, to be paid in XZC or it may be 'interest' on their investment or a share of the founder's reward. If you watch Shark Tank, you'll know what I'm talking about. This also makes sense on a contractual standpoint.
Gary and Poramin both mentioned NDAs which are also common and they may not be able to disclose the identity, the size of the investment and their entitlements from their investment. Now they are asked to explain the wallets being drained, but bound by the NDA, now you can imagine the situation they are in. In frustration, Gary said well when Zcash is transparent about their expenditure, they will be too which was received negatively but the fact is a much larger project like Zcash that's involving a lot more money is not subject to scrutiny because big names are involved while with Zcoin, the only known big name is Roger. Again, Zcoin's funding is i think many many many many times smaller than Zcash's and yet I think it is impressive they managed to get out a
WORKING implementation of Zerocoin and minting.
Bounties are also being paid for website design, coding work, community management, recruitment activities, marketing and also with important partners to increase adoption.
If you follow their slack you know that Poramin is full time working hard to implement MTP and improve Zcoin and I'm in almost daily contact with Gary and Poramin.
roger ver invested in a bunch of other coins too, that does NOT make this project any more (or less) legit !
do not overthink that big name mentioned here
anon dev's have a terrible reputation in the Crypto scene after the last couple of years and u can not blame the community for giving u sh..t about it.
Any dev who is there to stay and proud of his project would do it under his real name, everything else is BS
the whole 'you can trust us' but we can not talk about it due to NDA's is pretty lame
"impressive' they got it out on a small budget ?
come on - fork and launch, how much can that cost ?
these days everybody thinks (or sais he thinks and needs)
x thousand of BTC in an ICO to launch as suddenly it is sooooo expensive to run the network = BS
specially here , where it is a fork of another project
man man .... the crypto scene these days eh ....
