The Zcash Foundation cut spending by 17% during the first three months of this year due to Covid-19 pressures. In its first-quarter report, the foundation said it spent only $2.68 million from an initial budget of $3.24 million.

The report says:

Our budget reduction primarily stems from cancelling Zcon2 and reduced travel expenses.

Zcash is a popular coin centered on privacy. At the end of the quarter, the Zcash Foundation held about 101,000 ZEC, 42 Bitcoin (BTC), and $4 million cash in hand, according to the report.

The coronavirus outbreak has left businesses around the world counting costs. Zcash Foundation members said the pandemic’s impact on its operations was less severe because it has always operated remotely. In this period, the foundation utilized its blockchain network to develop a privacy-preserving contact tracing app in partnership with TCN Coalition, a global group of collaborators working towards a similar purpose.

In the review period, Zcash Foundation continued to work on Zebra – the Zcash consensus-compatible node client. The NU3 hard activation was rolled back to July from April, says the report, as work with Zecwallet for the release of the “light wallet version” is ongoing. This version of the wallet enables new Zcash users to shield their ZEC tokens immediately.

The Foundation plans to “deliver a simplified threshold scheme for multi-signature spends of shielded funds” called Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold (Frost). The scheme can be integrated into the Zcash Sapling protocol for private threshold payments, it said, all towards the goal of resisting surveillance.

The Q1 2020 report also provided an update on designing a Zcash-Cosmos pegzone. After reviewing the cross-chain integration concept with the members of the Cosmos ecosystem, the partners will publish a concrete roadmap during the second quarter of this year.

At the time of writing, zcash (ZEC) fell 9.2% to $42.05 over the last 24 hours. The coin has tanked more than 37 percent in the last 52 weeks, with its market capitalization skidding similarly to $378 million.

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