Zel Transparency Report — Q2 & Q3 2019 (April — September)

The Zel Foundation uses its annual operational allotment for grants & payments necessary to further the development of the Zel Ecosystem

The Zel Foundation

Zel is a fair-mined, community-based POW coin striving towards building an entire ecosystem of blockchain products including our multi-asset wallet platform, high-availability computational network, and dapp/SC development platform. Currently the project does not utilize any institutional investment funding, and the Zel Foundation fund is established to pursue technology advancement for Zel led by the community and other 3rd party developers.

How the Zel Foundation operates

Zel began life with a development fund of ~13.2 million Zel, to be strictly used for development of the project. In August 2018, the fund was allocated to the Foundation wing (~7.9 million), and now lives in two separate addresses, the Locked account and the Operational account. Each year, 10% of the original allotment is moved from the Locked account to the Operational account (790,000 Zel) to be used on furthering Zel development, which includes things like: Grants for wallet/daemon updates, development of ZelNodes features and dapps related to Zel, marketing/PR, anything that benefits the Zel project and Community. Ultimately, there will be a board of Community members that control the day-to-day operations of the Foundation, separate from the Zel core team, and responsible to the Zel Community.

Foundation Updates

The Zel Foundation and Community is strong and development on the project is rock solid even in the down cycle. Overall the current structure will support the roadmap (and perhaps a more aggressive roadmap) as planned. If an advanced roadmap is developed, the Foundation will revisit the funding models:

• The Zel Team and project development up to this point has been made possible with distributions from the Foundation to the individuals continually working on the project. This would be Core Team, outside Developers, Advisors and Community members.
• Despite under-performing markets, Zel has been meeting the roadmap milestones, development overall has been very strong for the whole project. This second half of 2019 will deliver large milestones and meet all the projections from the team.
• The value of the Zel Foundation fund holdings has required the team to use more Zel than planned to get to this point in the project. To continue the rapid development of the project, more Zel is needed to distribute to team members, outside developers, and payments for required services. This will include creating passive and reoccurring rev. gen. models like the community pool and so on.
• Funds will be used directly to pay for further development of ZelNodes (Flux) including more advanced benchmarking (Phase 2), marketing/PR/tutorial videos and graphics, any future payments necessary for legal requirements, and the necessary funds to pay for development of the main roadmap items such as future ZelFlux development and ZelDev.

In Summary: The Zel Foundation has done well to this point and is heading into next year with a realistic and attainable roadmap.

Zel Computational Network with ZelFlux is scheduled to release mid-November.

Transparency Report

Below is an itemized list of Operational account spending to date (11 October 2019) for Q2 & Q3 (Apr — Sept) 2019. The categories are lumped into major groups:

1. Advisor Payments including marketing, PR, legal, part-time/ongoing Zel ecosystem development, etc. — 135,464 ZEL
2. ZelLabs Community Pool including set up for hand-off from Pickaxe to FOMO Miners team, ongoing code maintenance, and backend infrastructure — 6,581 ZEL
3. Core Team payouts + single project outside developers including development resources/infrastructure, network & algo upgrades, infrastructure maintenance, legal fees, and basic marketing/PR resources — 183,500 ZEL
4. General Operations including ZEL sales to BTC to pay outside developers (ZelNodes, network upgrades, ZelHash, etc.), liquidity to allow quick-swapping Zel inside ZelCore, translations and other community-based campaigns, grants, and ZEL/ZECmate updating & maintenance — 421,445 ZEL
5. On July 10th, a very generous anonymous donor sent in 75,000 ZEL to the Development Donation address. To date, 27,500 ZEL has been used for ZelFlux development. Thanks to everyone that has donated to our Marketing, Development, Exchange Listing, and Coffee/Beer Fund addresses! The address holdings are itemized below.

• Fun side note: Every once in a while, it seems people mine to the Foundation address. We aren’t sure if this is intentional or not as nobody has come forward asking about the coin. That totals to a welcomed donation of about 1,571 ZEL. Thanks to whoever is doing this!

Grand Total: ~746,990 Zel

Operational Account Balance FY19
As of today (11 October 2019), there is 153,300 ZEL in the operational account. This will be used to continue development for the next several months. NOTE: spends were heavy due to development of Flux and Benchmarking for Phase 2 of the Zel Computational Network.

Donation Holdings
In addition to the Foundation, we have several donations made to the project:

• Marketing and PR - 5,351 Zel
• Exchange Listings - 6,139 Zel | 0.013 BTC
• Development - 48,849 Zel
• Coffee & Beer Fund - 2,027 Zel

We will be pushing the community to contribute to these donations, they are important for the growth of the project.

Looking Towards the Future

Depending on the revamped roadmap, price of Zel and other factors we may need to consider a partial move from the Year 2 allotment of 790,000 Zel into the Operational account, and will be utilized to fund the aggressive timeline of projects to keep on schedule with the roadmap milestones. This move will be announced to the community as we balance budgets and ongoing workloads. The goal is not NOT move these funds and be reliant on the current income structure, however; if needed we will address this with community input.

We also plan to generate development funds from revenue derived from the Zel Network, which would allow perpetual partial/full funding of Zel Community efforts without the use of a Founder’s reward or other undesirable schemes. More on this topic will be released in the future as the ZelNodes economic model is developed and posted.

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Written by Zel Technologies, GmbH — 11 October 2019 — Rev. 1

<https://zel.network>
<https://zelcore.io>
<https://zelid.io>