Invest2 publishers2 min readPublished
Zcash's policy group registers a single lobbyist against a $750,000 first-year budget
Pretty Good Policy for Zcash has registered Divij Pandya as its sole Washington lobbyist on a $750,000 first-year budget. The move takes Zcash's policy work out of developer lab ZODL and puts it in a separate group that looks to Zcash Community Grants for its money.
The Investor · Invest desk
Drafted by a language model from the sources cited here and checked against its claim ledger before publication. How we use AISend a correction
What happened
- The registration took effect Oct. 1 and lists the CLARITY Act and two digital asset tax proposals among its current and anticipated lobbying issues.
- PGPZ launched in June 2026 as an outgrowth of Pretty Good Policy for Crypto, a program Electric Coin Co. started in 2022.
- Crypto Briefing describes an agenda that also covers financial privacy, developer protections, anti-money laundering rules and sanctions.
- Pandya, who previously worked at FS Vector, will lead lobbying, policy analysis and coalition-building on Capitol Hill.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Spread evenly over the six agenda areas, $750,000 is $125,000 per issue for the year, with one registered lobbyist covering all of them.
- exposure Because PGPZ founder Paul Brigner is also ZODL's chief policy and regulatory officer, the developer lab stays tied to whatever positions the separate group takes on the Hill.
- contradiction Cointelegraph says Zcash Community Grants approved the $750,000 in August, while Crypto Briefing says the request is still pending; on the second account, PGPZ's first year depends on a grant vote that has not happened.
Two of the three legislative items Cointelegraph reports from the filing are tax proposals [3], so the registration leans toward the tax code (or rather, the part Cointelegraph reported does, since the filing lists those items "among" its issues [3]). The third is the CLARITY Act. In Crypto Briefing's description, market-structure law decides how digital assets get classified and supervised [15]. Neither report says where the bill stands in Congress, or whether PGPZ will work with or apart from the broader crypto trade groups [1][2].
PGPZ's budget comes to about $62,500 a month [2] for a 501(c)(4) whose only registered lobbyist is its executive director [1][2]. The allocation choice belongs to ZODL as much as to PGPZ. The lab led the earlier advocacy with Brigner and now keeps to core protocol, infrastructure and wallet development while supporting PGPZ's independence [8]. The Washington bill goes to an entity whose first-year money is a Zcash Community Grants decision [5][9].
The spend can be read a few ways. One possibility is a new instrument, a registered lobbyist, for work that until now ran through roundtables, policy events and a 2023 congressional briefing on encryption technologies [10][11]. Another is continuity: relationships Brigner and others spent years building [10] move into an entity with its own funding. The narrowest reading is a tax and market-structure retainer under a privacy name [3].
I think continuity fits best. A single-lobbyist group grown out of a program Electric Coin Co. started in 2022 [4] is mostly the old effort with its own budget line. The counter-case is that a registered lobbyist is a different tool from a briefing. Brigner, PGPZ's founder, said the goal is to "make sure Zcash has serious, organized, and credible policy engagement in Washington" [12][13]. "Policymakers are making decisions that will affect whether privacy-preserving digital cash can exist, be used lawfully, and serve the public interest," he said [14].
The continuity view is wrong if PGPZ's first year produces privacy or developer-protection language in the CLARITY Act or the two tax proposals that can be traced to the group's work [3][6].
What to watch
- Whether PGPZ registers lobbyists or outside firms beyond Pandya during its first year, which would show the remit or the budget growing past one person.
- PGPZ's first disclosures of lobbying spending, and whether AML and sanctions show up as lobbied issues next to the CLARITY Act and the tax proposals.