It seems many people have been misled these past few days.
Initially, I also thought @zinc_cash was going to privatize, but after reviewing the proposal, it seems that's not the case.
What I see now is more like MetaDAO wanting to acquire the remaining ZFKG shares to further concentrate control, rather than Zinc suddenly deciding to sell the project.
Many people on X are saying it was Zinc that proposed it, but after reviewing the proposal, it seems like MetaDAO is shifting the blame more.
The real issue isn't who proposed it, but why are people suddenly in such a hurry?
The answer is quite simple.
Because Zinc is incredibly profitable.
The daily revenue generated by the protocol has reached an outrageous level, and many are starting to compare it to Pump.
If a protocol can consistently generate revenue every day and has a reserve of revenue, then capital will definitely be interested.
No one will fight over a project that doesn't generate revenue.
Therefore, the discussion now isn't about whether Zinc has value, but about who wants the right to its future cash flow.
Conversely, this is actually Zinc's greatest strength.
While most projects in this market are still telling stories and drawing roadmaps, Zinc has already begun to generate significant profits, leading to equity battles.
There's another point many haven't noticed.
Currently, there's considerable opposition from the community, and whether the proposal will ultimately pass is uncertain.
But the market has already started trading sentiment based on the expectation of a successful privatization.
This is also the biggest problem with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Uncertainty) lately.
Many people haven't even read the proposal before spreading it.
I've always believed that a truly good protocol isn't one where no one questions it when it's rising, but one where people start scrambling to acquire it after it becomes profitable.
If Zinc were truly garbage, no one would have invested so much effort in figuring
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished In Crypto - The Wild & Crazy Zinc Story
I’ve been watching the Zinc / ZKFG situation unfold, and the more I learn, the clearer the actual story becomes.
This is not about poor early investors being abandoned as some accounts try to spin the narrative.
That is the FUD based on financial incentive. From the ORE community to see Zinc fail, and from secondary market folks who have a financial incentive to try to capture Zinc success only after Zinc became successful.
The “investors rugged” is the version people want to spread because it lets them wear the costume of justice while chasing someone else’s upside.
The real story is something much uglier.
It is a story about good faith being punished.
ZKLSOL raised money for an idea. The business that they raised money for was a mixer. A tornado cash for Solana, as it were.
The team worked hard on it on it. Gave it their best effort.
And the market did what markets do with countless startups.
It said no.
That is not a rug or some form of theft. That is the nature of startups in this space.
Most startups fail. Most ideas do not find product-market fit. Everyone loves to say they understand that when they are buying the dream. Far fewer remember it when the dream gets punched in the mouth by reality.
The founder did not just walk away as he had every legal right to do.
There was a $500K refund.
People who wanted out got out. Many in profit.
And from what I found, the founder received no equity back. No token back. No “thank you for being a good guy” bonus.
Just money out the door to make people whole because his original business concept failed and the founder is a good guy with a generous heart.
That matters a lot in the current narrative.
Because when people try to frame this as “Zinc rugged early investors,” they are leaving out the most important piece of history.
The early investor issue was not ignored.
It was addressed.
Maybe not perfectly. Nothing in crypto is ever perfect. Half this industry is held together with duct tape.
But there was good faith.
Real good faith.
Actual money.
Actual exits.
Actual effort to keep people from being left behind.
But good faith is not the same thing as formal obligation.
There was no formal investor approval of a legal pivot into Zinc.
No signed addendum.
No updated operating agreement. (I know, as I've read the entirety of the 20-page operating agreement)
No formal contribution of Zinc IP into the original structure.
No clean legal document that turned an act of goodwill into a permanent claim on whatever the team built next.
This is an important context.
It also highlights the absolute mess of MetaDAO as a facilitator - one would think the founders would have insisted on formalizing this to protect early investors - instead they now have put up a proposal to formalize this long after the fact, and only after Zinc’s phenomenal success.
Because trying to carry people forward after a failed startup does not mean every future success becomes theirs to claim. Especially on an entirely unrelated business.
So the team decided they were going to dust off a two-year old idea and build Zinc instead. Zinc started working incredibly well. It quickly became the #2 revenue generating protocol on Solana.
That is when everything changed.
Suddenly the room filled with people who were not there for the hard part at the beginning.
They were not there when the first business failed.
They were not there when the team was trying to figure out how to salvage value for investors of a failed business, when they had no legal or moral obligation to do so.
They were not there when early supporters were being given a way out.
But the moment Zinc showed signs of life?
The moment the thing started getting attention?
The moment there was blood in the water and money on the table?
Here they came.
Late buyers.
Arb hunters.
Opportunists.
Like the founder of @streamflow_fi who put out the biggest piece of FUD on the topic, only later to admit that he was a late-stage arb buyer of the proposed outcome.
People who did not carry the original risk, but now want to inherit the reward.
And the most disgusting part is they are trying to use the language of investor protection to do it.
No.
Investor protection is making sure original supporters had a fair path out.
Investor protection is honoring the actual process.
Investor protection is respecting a passed proposal.
What we are watching now is something entirely different.
A passed proposal offered ZKFG holders a premium exit.
It passed.
The market spoke.
That should mean something.
Actually, it should mean everything in the theater that is "governance".
The founders of MetaDAO asked for a deposit to go towards the passed proposal. That deposit was sent over two transactions:
https://t.co/VNavH1y3E1
https://t.co/TwcCYqkfGA
Only after the deposit was sent (which is still being held hostage and not returned) did they say that they were not going to execute the passed proposal.
If a decision market can approve an outcome, and then that outcome can be dismissed after the fact because someone says the format was wrong, then the market is not sovereign.
Someone else is.
And if money was requested to support that proposal, an address was provided, funds were sent, the proposal passed, and then the proposal was later treated as invalid while the money sits without being returned, that should concern every single person who claims to care about governance.
You cannot have it both ways.
You cannot say a proposal is real enough to request initial funding, but not real enough to honor.
That is not how trust is built.
And all of this brings us to the the real lesson for builders.
If you try to do what you think is right, regardless of any legal obligation to do so, someone will eventually call it an admission of liability.
If you try to help early supporters when you have no requirement to do so, someone will eventually call it an obligation.
If you try to salvage value from a failed idea, someone will eventually show up late and claim your future success.
That is how good founders learn to grow cold.
That is how this industry teaches builders to give people exactly what the paperwork requires and not a single ounce more.
And then we all sit around wondering why everyone rugs, hides, ghosts, or lawyer-speaks their way through every uncomfortable situation.
We created that.
We reward the worst behavior, then act shocked when good behavior disappears.
Zinc did not create this mess by succeeding.
Zinc simply exposed it.
It exposed the difference between original supporters of a completely different business who were given a path out, and late opportunists trying to turn secondary-market positioning into moral authority.
It exposed whether passed proposals actually matter.
It exposed whether futarchy is a real governance system or just a beautiful machine that can still be unplugged when the result gets uncomfortable for those with greed in their hearts.
And it exposed something very simple:
Some people did not want fairness.
They wanted a claim on success, only after it became successful.
They wanted to arrive after the risk, after the work, after the refund, after the failure, after the rebuild, and say:
“Now that it works, we own some of that too.”
That is not justice.
That is greed.
Honor the passed proposal.
Resolve the funds.
Stop pretending late buyers are abandoned early investors.
And let builders build.
Because if this is how we treat builders with good faith, then no one should be surprised when the next founder shows none.
🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋
The Story Of Taxicabs & Why People In Crypto Stay Broke
Taxicabs were well-established.
Licensed. Regulated. Battle-tested. For decades, they were the default way to get from point A to point B if you did not want to drive yourself.
But then society changed.
Smartphones changed consumer behavior. Amazon changed expectations. People became trained to believe they should be able to pull out their phone, press a button, get what they want, and track it all the way to their front door.
Meanwhile, taxis mostly stayed analog.
They failed to understand or act on what the mass market was demanding.
People no longer wanted to call a dispatcher. They no longer wanted to stand in the rain wondering if every yellow car turning the corner was finally their ride. They wanted simplicity. Certainty. Convenience. A map. A timer. A button.
Then Uber came along.
Uber did not invent for-hire transportation. It simply iterated on the experience.
And that distinction matters.
You can love and respect taxis. You can even be invested in taxi companies.
But if you become so emotionally married to taxis that you mock every iteration built for mass-market demand, you are not thinking like an investor.
At that point you're @PeterSchiff fudding BTC because you're invested in Gold.
You are thinking like a monogamous spouse.
This is crypto’s disease.
People do not invest in things anymore. They marry them.
They build identities around them. They put the ticker in their bio. They defend the bags like family honor. They confuse criticism with betrayal and diversification with treason.
I was going to leave this topic alone today. Truly. I had other things I wanted to write about.
But waking up to a pile of attacks in my notifications from people with pickaxes in their profile made me change my mind.
So let me speak plainly.
I have publicly supported @ORE . I still do.
I think @HardhatChad is one of the most reputable developers in this entire space. I am an investor in ORE. I understand the thesis. I respect the design. I respect the grind.
But I am also here to make money.
That is my obligation to myself. To my family. To the life I am trying to build.
This is not cosplay for me. This is not a fan club. This is my job.
So when I see something like @zinc_cash come along and iterate on the ORE category in a way that I believe better matches what the broader market wants, of course I am going to pay attention. And yes, of course I am going to invest.
ORE is steady.
It is stable. It is slow. It is patient. With well-understood strategies, discipline, and enough time, almost anyone can remain profitable over the long term, assuming the price of ORE itself does not collapse.
That is valuable and there is a demand for that.
But it is also boring.
And whether people like admitting it or not, the broader crypto market does not wake up every morning looking for boring.
The broader market wants the chaos gods to smile upon them.
They want a grind, yes. But they also want the possibility of outsized returns. They want to feel like there is a reason to keep pressing the button. They want the chance that today is the day something absurd happens.
Zinc understood that.
The Bonanza and Stockpile features are product-level acknowledgments of what the market actually wants.
Is that good? Is that bad?
Irrelevant.
It is what is.
One of the most expensive mistakes people make in crypto is confusing what they wish the market wanted with what the market actually wants.
The market does not care about your emotional attachment.
The market rewards what captures attention, liquidity, and behavior.
That does not mean ORE is dead. It does not mean Zinc wins. It does not mean one must destroy the other.
It means an investor is allowed to own shares of a taxi company and invest in early-stage Uber.
If anything, it's a hedge.
It's understanding that if a new iteration starts stealing attention, users, or liquidity from something you already own, the answer is not to scream on the side of the road cursing the cars passing you.
The answer is to ask whether you should own some of those cars too.
Crypto keeps people broke because they fall in love with bags that were only ever supposed to be investments.
And then they watch the market move on without them, still standing in the rain, waiting for the taxi they swore would always be there.
🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋
Announcement:
Earlier today myself, along with the insanely talented @milkbeard5 assisted the @zinc_cash team in tweaking the liquidity structure with their LP efforts.
As Zinc is the third top daily earning protocol on Solana and is gaining a lot of traction we saw an opportunity to optimize the already amazing work being done by the Zinc team.
Sometimes when something becomes too popular too fast it can have negative consequences down the road unless mitigated early.
We were not compensated in any way for this consultation. @milkbeard5 is just an amazing human being who hopped in to help as a personal favor to me, and of course my motivation is to help amazing builders be better (while helping protect my own investment, naturally).
I am incredibly bullish on what Zinc has built and firmly believe it’s going to be an incredible net positive not only to Solana but to the space in general.
🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋
Dear Trenchers:
If you find yourself unable to escape the cycle of abuse in the memecoin casino may I offer a couple of substitutes:
@ORE@zinc_cash
I'm a fan of ORE and believe it has a more stable long-term structure, however there is zero denying that Zinc has more immediate upside.
Both legitimately provide better chances at seeing returns on your investment than the memecoin casino.
Study the mechanics of the games. Develop your strategy. Find your dopamine hit on a 60 second loop. Support Solana network activity in the process.
Disclaimer: I have small amounts of capital invested into both and am currently adding to my Zinc bag.
Dear Trenchers:
If you find yourself unable to escape the cycle of abuse in the memecoin casino may I offer a couple of substitutes:
@ORE@zinc_cash
I'm a fan of ORE and believe it has a more stable long-term structure, however there is zero denying that Zinc has more immediate upside.
Both legitimately provide better chances at seeing returns on your investment than the memecoin casino.
Study the mechanics of the games. Develop your strategy. Find your dopamine hit on a 60 second loop. Support Solana network activity in the process.
Disclaimer: I have small amounts of capital invested into both and am currently adding to my Zinc bag.