Coinholder Polling on Governance and Funding

[outgoing.doze]

I would be happy to help you more here; I guess for next time.

[dismad]

Here is how to use the vote app with any seed phrase:

If you have a seed/account loaded in Ywallet that you want to use, you can also try this way:

[outgoing.doze]

@aquietinvestor

If you want to vote ZEC held in a transparent address, follow the instructions outlined by @outgoing.doze

It may be worth mentioning that funds are not to be moved on their wallet during the voting period, otherwise there’s a risk it can be gamed.

[outgoing.doze]

@aquietinvestor

The second asks whether you support prioritizing a new Dev Fund and the implementation of a new funding model, even if doing so delays NU7.

While I feel like I understand the options of the first question reasonably well, I really cannot say the same about the second one.

Where can I read more about that? What is the position of Shielded Labs on the matter?

[joshs]

[pacu]

Can @hanh @dismad @aquietinvestor @james_katz confirm this?

People with electoral anxiety might be confused

@aquietinvestor

First, the safest way to participate now that the registration period has ended is to move the ZEC out of the wallet you’re using to vote. That way, when you enter the seed phrase to vote, the wallet will be empty, eliminating any risk of losing funds.

The quote above is for SHIELDED Zec

The quote below is for TRANSPARENT ZEC

@aquietinvestor

Note: Funds cannot be moved during the voting period, which runs from April 16, 11:59 PM UTC (Block 2,892,057) to May 1 at 11:59 PM UTC (Block TBD).

[aquietinvestor]

Confirmed. I separated the shielded and transparent processes into two sections to make it easier to follow. But, it’s still a lot of information, so feel free to reach out with any questions.

[aquietinvestor]

The second question is best understood in the context of the first. The poll as a whole is intended to determine whether there is community consensus to establish a new Dev Fund and funding model, and if so, which proposal is preferred. The first question asks which proposal you support or whether you believe the Dev Fund should end and all block rewards should go to miners. The second question asks whether you support implementing a new Dev Fund and funding model, even if it results in further delays to NU7.

This second question matters because even if a proposal receives the most votes in Question 1, it won’t move forward if a majority of respondents say “No” to Question 2. In that case, no new Dev Fund or funding model would be implemented until after NU7 is completed. NU7 is an important network upgrade with several features under consideration, including Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs), the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), Memo Bundles, and more. NU7 depends on the deprecation of zcashd, which is still in progress and has already been delayed multiple times. These delays have been a point of frustration for many in the community.

Depending on the proposal selected, implementing a new funding model could cause further delays. Some proposals, like the C&C model, are relatively straightforward. Others, such as the Zcash Governance Bloc (zBloc), are more complex and would take more time to implement. However, even simpler funding models could shift engineering focus away from zcashd deprecation and NU7 and result in additional delays. The second question is meant to assess whether the community believes establishing a new Dev Fund should take priority, or whether the focus should remain on delivering NU7 as soon as possible.

Shielded Labs does not have an official position on the second question. We believe this is a decision that should be made by coinholders and the broader community based on the trade-offs involved.

The below threads provide context to help better understand Question #2:

Zip Editors' NU7 ZIP Viability Assessment

This is the ZIP Editors’ and consensus node implementors’ assessment of the candidate ZIPs proposed for inclusion in NU7, with rationale. In summary: Most of the candidate ZIPs have been determined to be safe, feasible, and useful to include. The complexity of the upgrade is significant, primarily due to the ZSA ZIPs, but our assessment is that the community would prefer a slightly delayed NU7 activation over excluding the ZIPs that we have recommended to include. There is not a simple relati…

NU7 Timeline and the Dev Fund Expiration

In my Z|ECC summary post, I mentioned that the ECC team reviewed the NU7 timeline (including vanilla ZSAs, the NSM, and memo bundles) and does not believe the network upgrade is likely to activate in August. According to our estimates, an “optimistic” date for the NU7 activation is sometime in October. Keep in mind that these optimistic dates are not commitments, they are only stated to give people an idea of possible timing. This delay is because we are running behind on implementing the repla…

Let's focus on ZSAs

I’m not the type to idolise celebrity businessfolk but there are certain ideas, mental models and nuggets of advice that live in my head rent-free. One example is Steve Jobs’ perspective on setting priorities, which he articulated onstage at WWDC ’97: “Focusing is about saying no.” ["Focusing is about saying no" - Steve Jobs (WWDC'97)] That attitude clearly became embedded in Apple’s culture. Jony Ive cites it as one of the most important lessons he learnt from Jobs, adding “You c…

Community Polling on Funding Model ZIPs

Dear Zcash Community, We have important decisions ahead that will significantly impact Zcash’s governance and sustainability. After many months of calls for proposals and discussions, we are at a critical decision point. Collaboration and cooperation among Zcash organizations and ecosystem partners is essential for determining the path forward. In this spirit, @Alex_ZF (interim Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation), @aquietinvestor (Executive Director of Shielded Labs), and I have been m…

[outgoing.doze]

Thanks a lot for those clarifications @aquietinvestor, that was very helpful.

While in the process of pushing my vote, I realized another vulnerability to the procedure I have suggested for transparent wallets: replay attack. I’ll admit some frustration because for me it’s a bit of a process to figure out attacks that must stick out like a sore thumb to the elite cryptographers, paid by the dev fund, we supposedly have in here.

Anyway, adding a date within the time range of the vote, I believe, solves this. Glad we’re going to ramp up voting regularity so we can get better at this.

As discussed at length in a related thread, this poll does not have the legitimacy to result in the alteration of the inflation distribution in any way. Ideally, we would have on-chain governance to make all this very neat and straightforward but I understand it isn’t an option at this point. However, we could, and absolutely should at the very least, have a Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) that would precisely define the polling procedure, which itself would include how it would be interpreted, among other things. Currently we have absolutely nothing, anywhere, that defines how this vote will be interpreted.

For that reason, and very much in alignment with my first message on this forum, until we have a poll that has the necessary legitimacy to make substantial changes to the protocol, I will be against any further usage of the dev fund.

As for the second question. Because of what I said above, and because I believe it would be against the interests of the project, as well as mine as a stakeholder, to delay the critical work that has been started, I have therefore voted against prioritizing the extension of the dev fund.

I have sent my vote the the wallet created for this poll and was able to see it in Ywallet using the View Key provided above. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do this using zcashexplorer.app/vk which returned an error (" There was an error when importing the VK. Invalid Input ").

1F; 2B (20250420)

t1VydNnkjBzfL1iAMyUbwGKJAF7PgvuCfMY

IOvWJ1KPOrh5JR+vf8Alc8zqehLX/7sm0bFbOdZx2ROAS64bn6ETOKJMtOMXusHGZCJJ2ORga8Xr42KKMwSTP7M=

[gigantes]

Is there a problem with the coin voting system?

When I download the blockchain data, my available voting power is 0 even if it was displayed correctly a few days ago.

[aquietinvestor]

If you haven’t already done so, please try this:

@aquietinvestor

when you create a new election, you’ll see a switch for “Internal Wallet” that allows the app to scan for funds stored in internal accounts, like those used by Zashi, Edge, eZcash, and other wallets that follow ZIP 316. This is to address an issue where users of these wallets did not see their full balance available to vote. If you hold ZEC in both internal and external accounts, you’ll need to cast your vote twice: once with the switch turned on, and once with it turned off.

Here’s the background on the issue, which impacts any wallet that follows ZIP 316.

@aquietinvestor

We’ve received reports from some users whose voting power does not reflect their full ZEC balance, even though their coins were transferred to the Orchard pool before the registration deadline. In one example, a user withdrew ZEC from a centralized exchange to a transparent address in Zashi, then shielded the funds into the Orchard pool.

The root cause is related to how internal keys are derived. For example, Zashi creates separate internal accounts when handling actions like shielding. The current version of the Coin Voting 2.0 app does not yet support scanning multiple internal key paths, so it may miss balances stored in these internal accounts.

[gigantes]

It came back without me doing anything differently.

[hanh]

I think the explorer only supports sapling viewing keys.

[pacu]

I asked GPT to make variant’s of @joshs “I voted” badge

I delegated to ZecHub

I voted from Brasil

Eu! che! Ya voté!

I voted from Venezuela

I voted from Colombia

I voted from Spain

Uhmmm I see some animosity here

[tonym]

Has anyone received this error message when trying to vote?

[aquietinvestor]

Hi @tonym. I checked with Hanh about the error you encountered. It looks like the data download was interrupted. Can you try generating a new election file and see if that resolves it?

[tonym]

Just tried that again and got the same error message. To add more context, I was able to successfully vote with a small portion of my voting power on Q1 and with my full voting power on Q2. However, I get this error when I try to vote on Q1 with my remaining voting power.

[ebfull]

is your remaining voting power fractional? There could be a parsing error translating it into zatoshis.

[dismad]

@tonym

I was able to successfully vote with a small portion of my voting power on Q1 and with my full voting power on Q2.

Did you use integer amounts? I was able to vote twice with the same seed no issues. Here is a picture of my history on my test account

[tonym]

The remaining amount is fractional but I’ve tried to vote with several different whole integer amounts and get the same error message.