Zcash holders overwhelmingly back faster transactions and bitcoin-style halvings

Zcash coin holders used a privacy-protecting ballot to weigh in on NU7, the network’s next major upgrade, with almost 2.4 million ZEC cast — about two-thirds of the roughly 3.6 million ZEC eligible at the snapshot. Organizers had required at least 1 million ZEC to participate for the vote to be treated as representative, a threshold the vote comfortably exceeded.

Voters gave overwhelming backing to several key proposals. Nearly all participating stake (99.9%) supported reducing the block interval to 25 seconds from 75 seconds to speed confirmations. A similarly decisive 98.9% favored keeping Zcash’s bitcoin-style halving schedule rather than replacing it with a smoother issuance curve. Holders also voted 96.6% to postpone reissuing ZEC collected by the Network Sustainability Mechanism until February 2031, and about 99.3% chose to ship NU7 as soon as possible, dropping any feature that misses a Sept. 30 readiness cutoff.

The ballot process was limited to ZEC held in Ironwood, Zcash’s newest shielded transaction pool, so only shielded balances could vote. The voting system preserved those balances’ privacy: ballots were encrypted, split into 16 parts, and counted in a way that let validators tally stake-weighted outcomes without reconstructing which holder cast which vote or revealing individual balances. That contrasts with an earlier NU7 sentiment poll in February that saw just 7.25% of circulating ZEC participate and exposed sharper divisions between holders and the Community Advisory Panel.

The result does not itself alter protocol rules; the selected changes still need to be implemented, tested and packaged into the eventual upgrade. The vote does, however, give developers a clear mandate on priorities including faster private payments, a goal that aligns with other recent work: prior reporting noted software improvements that in some tests reduced proof-generation times on mobile devices from over three seconds to under 200 milliseconds, and separate projects such as Zakura and Project Tachyon are targeting higher private-transaction throughput. On monetary policy, the NSM will continue to remove a portion of fees from circulation (including at least 60% of transaction fees) and eventually recycle those ZEC through block rewards without increasing the network’s maximum supply.