Zcash holders gave near-unanimous backing to faster transactions and preserving the network's bitcoin-style halving schedule in a governance vote that drew roughly two-thirds of the ZEC eligible to participate.
Almost 2.4 million ZEC voted on the scope of NU7, Zcash's next major network upgrade, out of roughly 3.6 million ZEC eligible at the snapshot. The results are weighted by ZEC rather than the number of individual people voting, with one eligible ZEC representing one vote.
Organizers had set 1 million ZEC as the minimum turnout needed to treat the result as representative of coinholders.
Some 99.9% of participating ZEC backed cutting the time between blocks to 25 seconds from 75 seconds. Blocks are batches of transactions added to the network, so shorter block times generally mean users see payments confirmed faster.
Another 98.9% voted to keep Zcash’s bitcoin-style halvings. Miners, the computers that help secure the network, are paid partly in newly created ZEC. A halving cuts that new-coin reward in half at fixed intervals. The alternative would have reduced the amount of new ZEC more gradually over time instead of making those big scheduled cuts.
The voting system itself is as unusual as the result.
Only ZEC held in Ironwood, Zcash’s newest private transaction pool, could vote. “Shielded” simply means the blockchain can verify that the coins exist and are being spent correctly without publicly showing the wallet balance or the details of the transaction.
That privacy carried over into the vote. In a normal token vote, a wallet casting 500,000 votes can effectively announce to the world that it controls 500,000 tokens and which side it backed. Zcash’s system let that economic weight count without publishing the holder’s balance or identity alongside the choice.
Ballots were encrypted and split into 16 separate pieces before being counted. Validators could add up the final result without being able to reconstruct which holder cast which vote or how much ZEC that person controlled.
In other words, holders could use their actual economic stake to vote on Zcash's monetary policy and technical roadmap while keeping the size of that stake hidden.
Read More: Zcash seals $1.7 billion shielded pool as Ironwood upgrade activates
That is a major jump from Zcash's earlier coinholder polling. February's NU7 sentiment poll drew participation equal to just 7.25% of circulating ZEC and exposed sharp disagreements between coinholders and Zcash's Community Advisory Panel, or ZCAP.
The latest system was introduced this summer to replace the previous token-holder voting process and give shielded balances much stronger privacy guarantees.
Holders also voted 96.6% to wait until February 2031 before beginning to reissue ZEC collected through the Network Sustainability Mechanism, or NSM.
The planned system removes funds from circulation, including at least 60% of transaction fees, and eventually recycles the ZEC through future block rewards. The mechanism does not change Zcash's maximum supply.
The result keeps the existing halving schedule intact while allowing several years of those recycled fees to accumulate before they begin returning to miners.
Meanwhile, holders also showed little appetite for delaying the broader upgrade. About 99.3% voted to ship NU7 as soon as possible while dropping any feature that is not implemented by a Sept. 30 readiness deadline, rather than waiting for every approved component to be finished.
Read More: Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness
The 25-second block proposal also fits into a wider effort to make private ZEC payments much faster.
CoinDesk reported in August that new Zcash software had cut proof-generation times on mobile devices from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests, while separate work around Zakura and Project Tachyon is targeting much higher private-transaction throughput.
The vote gives developers a much clearer map for NU7 after months of disagreement over its scope. It does not itself change the network, however, with the selected features still needing to be implemented, tested and included in the eventual upgrade.
Nearly 2.4 million ZEC nevertheless weighed in on those decisions while the individual balances behind the votes remained hidden, turning one of crypto's oldest privacy systems into the machinery for deciding what the network builds next.