NU7 Coinholder Vote

General
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Valar Group and Project Tachyon are calling for a coinholder vote to begin August 25, 2026 and last approximately 18 days. The vote will decide on NU7 Scope, mirroring the previous poll that was cancelled due to the Orchard counterfeiting bug and Ironwood / NU6.3 work.

This thread describes the questions we’ll include in the poll and some information about the voting protocol. We’ll be updating this thread with additional details in the coming days.

The Coinholder Voting Chain

This vote is happening on a dedicated voting chain, using audited technology developed by Valar Group to replace our previous THV process. We encourage shielded Zcash wallets to allow their users to vote on this chain, as it preserves their users’ privacy while keeping their funds safe.

Wallets can configure different voting chains. It is permissionless to spin up your own voting chain; voters must only modify a configuration to participate in a different process, and we encourage wallets to permit their users to do so.

The default voting chain will permit voting when at least two organizations call for it:

  • Five organizations will be configured: Project Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation[1], Zodl, and Shielded Labs. This forms a coordinator multisig. These are adjustable parameters that can be modified in between votes based on feedback and experience.
  • There is a distributed election authority that runs the vote and produces its results. It consists of at least 10 validators who exclusively hold per-round decryption key shares. Validators cannot learn the identity of voters, and only the final tally can be recovered by at least two thirds of the validators.
    • Reach out if you’d like to be a validator!

NU7 Scope Poll

Valar Group and Project Tachyon are planning to call for a vote on this chain to begin on August 25, 2026 and last ~18 days. Specifically, eligible voters need spendable shielded funds in Ironwood at the time of a blockchain snapshot that occurs on August 24, 2026 at 19:00 UTC. Funds can be moved immediately after the snapshot. Eligible ZEC can vote until September 14, 2026 at 19:00 UTC. The results will be published shortly after the vote concludes.

We consider the results legitimate and representative of coinholders if at least 1,000,000 ZEC participates in at least one question. We have confirmed that Vizor and Zodl will support the voting process, and we hope other wallets do the same.

We plan to ask the following questions, adapted from previous poll questions. Please provide feedback in this thread. We have removed proposals that would involve a transaction format change.

Q1 (NSM Issuance Smoothing)

The fee-burning component of the Network Sustainability Mechanism is already approved. The issuance smoothing component is unresolved. In no case will the total supply of ZEC be affected.

Which approach do you support?

  1. Smooth issuance curve. Replace halvings with a gradual issuance curve. NSM-recycled funds reissue along the same curve.
  2. Preserve halvings. Keep the existing halving schedule for new ZEC. Fees and donated funds removed from circulation are eventually reissued into future block rewards.
  3. Do not include issuance smoothing in NU7. How unissued funds are reissued is left to future governance.
  4. Abstain.

Refs: ZIP 233, ZIP 234

Q2 (NSM Reissuance Start Date)

NSM has prior coinholder approval. This question concerns the start of fee reissuance under the mechanism.

When should NSM reissuance of transaction fees begin?

  1. As soon as possible after NSM activation.
  2. After the fourth halving (around 2032).
  3. Abstain.

Q3 (Sprout Deprecation)

The Sprout pool was deprecated in 2018. Deposits are disabled, it holds less than 23,000 ZEC, and it accounts for under 0.1% of transaction volume. Deprecation of v4 transactions is now broadly accepted; only timing is open.

The disposition of the affected funds is out of scope for this poll and is not specified here.

When should v4 transactions be disabled?

  1. Immediately at NU7 activation.
  2. One year after this poll concludes.
  3. Do not set a v4 transaction deprecation date.
  4. Abstain.

Q4 (Faster Block Times)

Should we reduce the block target spacing from 75s to 25s, and introduce per-pool action limits, per [ZIP-218]?

  1. Yes.
  2. No.
  3. Abstain.

Q5 (NU7 Schedule)

NU7 will include NSM fee recycling, and be consistent with the results of this poll, assuming each feature is implemented by September 30th. How should non-ready features be handled?

  1. Ship NU7 as soon as possible, removing any feature that is not implemented by the September 30th deadline.
  2. Delay NU7 until every feature in this poll is deemed complete.
  3. I do not support this NU7 plan.
  4. Abstain.

How to Audit

The voting protocol is intended to be open and reusable: any group should be able to surface polls, any wallet should be able to display them, and anyone should be able to run a chain or audit a result.

  1. We have not received a coordination key from the Zcash Foundation yet. ↩︎

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ZCAP NU7 Poll Opens August 27th
The Coinholder Voting Chain
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Have yall reached out to each of the key orgs to coordinate this? It does seem a bit rushed, considering everything going on.

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Clearly all the orgs were aware of this:

IMG_1140
IMG_1140792×426 63.5 KB

But a single org should not be able to block a token holder vote. In fact any token holder should be able to call a vote!

The good news is Zcash is getting decentralized and is not dependent on any single organizatiom to make progress. Great for Zcash!

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Thanks, Sean. Can you give us more details about multi-signatures and validators? And more generally, how does this new system offer an advantage over the previous voting system? I like the idea of ​​including several organizations, although I wonder the same thing as Dismad.

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New features of this voting system:

  • Supports voting from hardware wallets (Keystone)!
  • Has no registration period, just a snapshot height
    • Leverages PIR to achieve this with no privacy leakage and less bandwidth!
  • Maintains far stronger balance privacy guarantees.
    • All votes are homomorphically encrypted to the validator set. Only the aggregate amount of “YES/NO/ABSTAIN” for each question is shown. Previously it could be learned - leaking many people’s balances. The exact problem were solving in Ironwood migrations with ZIP-318 as well :slight_smile:
    • All votes are split up into 16 unlinkable ballots, so that even if the validator set colluded, balance-privacy is retained.
  • Much easier to run nodes, call votes, and audit the votes :slight_smile:
  • Available in popular wallets!

The multi-sigs is checked in two parts:

  • The chain validators require it to do the requisite processing work to allow a vote
  • The wallets check it for a different reason. Wallets dynamically get configs for each live vote, and these are “ratified”, by the multi-sig to fix an edge case.

A longer post on this coming tomorrow.

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A question on block time reductions, if the time betweens blocks gets reduced, then the natural halving schedule will get accelerated (3x) as will emissions through miners, right? From a block time perspective there are no changes, but in a human-measurable time frame then there will be more float or coins added to circulation faster. Just want to make it clear as this would have a knock on effect on decisions towards managing NSM issuance and smoothing vs halving.

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No one blocked anything.

In the case of consensus change, it is a sentiment poll, not a vote. Consensus changes require clear community will. There is no single means - no single voice. Everyone must be aligned.

In the case of retroactive grant funding, it is a coin holder (ZEC is not a token) vote, and there is a process.

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I’m not a fan of the last question. This hypothetical does not lend itself well to a multiple-choice format. People may reasonably choose differently depending on whether a single feature is delayed by a year or all but one are delayed by three days; they may also choose differently depending on which feature is delayed.

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I assume that’s why memo bundles are not included in the poll. Has it been decided that they won’t ship for NU7 and why?

Generally I think the polls would be a lot more useful if the different sides would give a rationale for why they support a certain decision.

For example:

I know that the keeping Sprout around takes significant engineering effort from the protocol engineers, which is why I think it should be disabled sooner rather than later.

But without that context the naive coinholder sentiment might be to “keep it around forever”.

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There isn’t currently appetite for a transaction format change that would break the wallets, based on conversations in Prague.

The champions of the polls can provide that rationale themselves here on the forum and elsewhere. In the past, these poll questions became bloated with rationales that barely appeared neutral or balanced, and confused voters, so that’s why you don’t see them in my post.

In the particular case of the Sprout question, I plan to very strongly advocate getting rid of it ASAP and not waiting long to turn it off. Last time I was not very vocal about it, which was a mistake. Sprout is also slightly goofy for the protocol now after NU6.3, since payments can take place inside of it (unlike Orchard today), which somewhat contradicts our circulating ZEC principle.

This question appeared in the cancelled poll from months ago. The idea, as I understand it, is that some features depend on their advocates to actually implement (and audit, and specify) the changes, but NU7 itself should move on without those features if needed IMO.

Note that NU7 is years behind schedule.

The block time reductions are paired with a proportional decrease in the per-block subsidy, such that the daily issuance rate is maintained. The NSM questions in this poll are therefore independent of it.

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I appreciate the poll questions being statements stripped of opinions and reasons - let people advocate for them in public. This takes friction & tension out of phrasing the questions. The person who gets to choose framing wins.

These questions are much more clear than the last vote I remember doing.

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(post deleted by author)

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This is wildly unprofessional and off-topic for the thread. You should be contacting vendors to disclose vulnerabilities and confirm they are legitimate, since you could either be wrong (you’re not an expert in the codebase) or the issue could theoretically be more serious than you realize. Instead you are posting here on a forum the second your LLM spits something out.

The fact you don’t know this or don’t care means people are going to take you less seriously even when your reports are legitimate.

EDIT: @strahncryptography deleted the post I replied to and it no longer appears on this forum; the other deleted comment above it is not what I replied to here.

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In particular, the bug in the second comment prior to deletion is not true, and is explicitly handled in the voting libraries.

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How did you decide on this number? What happens if Zodl and other wallets are not ready in time?

" the results legitimate"

What exactly is your proposed coin holder vote suppose to signal? How will the results be interpreting for governance puproses? I think its best you spell it out so there is no confusion.

Who are the 10 validators?

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After some discussion with Zcash Foundation/Zodl/Shielded Labs, we decided to adjust the end date of the poll to September 14th, so I’ve edited the post. We’re still taking feedback about the questions and discussing adjustments to make sure everyone is on the same page. :slight_smile:

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@ValarDragon just created a thread describing more of the technical details: The Coinholder Voting Chain

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Thank you, I’ll read it.

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Project Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, Shielded Labs, and Zodl have agreed to make some modifications to these poll questions to reconcile them with the previous questions. Zcash Foundation is running a concurrent ZCAP sentiment collection poll that will use the same questions. We’ve adjusted the end date of our coinholder vote to align with ZCAP’s poll.

Adjustments

We’re clarifying that the 1,000,000 ZEC participation threshold is reached by any one question receiving at least 1,000,000 ZEC votes, including any abstentions. The goal of the participation threshold is to ensure the poll as a whole is taken seriously only if a substantial portion of ZEC participates in the process. It is not intended for this threshold to apply to any particular question.

-**We consider the results legitimate and representative of coinholders if at least 1,000,000 ZEC participates.** We have confirmed that [Vizor](https://vizor.cash/) will support the voting process, and we hope that Zodl and other wallets do the same.
+**We consider the results legitimate and representative of coinholders if at least 1,000,000 ZEC participates in at least one question.** We have confirmed that [Vizor](https://vizor.cash/) and [Zodl](https://zodl.com/) will support the voting process, and we hope other wallets do the same.

Further, we’ve made a couple other minor tweaks to unify the questions with the old poll.

 1. **Smooth issuance curve.** Replace halvings with a gradual issuance curve. NSM-recycled funds reissue along the same curve.
-2. **Preserve halvings.** Keep the existing halving schedule for newly minted ZEC. Fees and donated funds removed from circulation are eventually reissued into future block rewards.
+2. **Preserve halvings.** Keep the existing halving schedule for new ZEC. Fees and donated funds removed from circulation are eventually reissued into future block rewards.
 3. Do not include issuance smoothing in NU7. How unissued funds are reissued is left to future governance.
 4. Abstain.
 
+*Refs: [ZIP 233](https://zips.z.cash/zip-0233), [ZIP 234](https://zips.z.cash/zip-0234)*
+
 ## Q2 (NSM Reissuance Start Date)
 
 NSM has prior coinholder approval. This question concerns the start of fee reissuance under the mechanism.
@@ -58,7 +60,7 @@ The disposition of the affected funds is out of scope for this poll and is not s
 
 ## Q4 (Faster Block Times)
 
-**Should we reduce the target block time from 75s to 25s, and introduce per-pool action limits, per [\[ZIP-218\]](https://zips.z.cash/zip-0218)?**
+**Should we reduce the block target spacing from 75s to 25s, and introduce per-pool action limits, per [\[ZIP-218\]](https://zips.z.cash/zip-0218)?**
 
 1. Yes.

Transaction Format Changes

This reduced-scope poll avoids transaction format changes; to the extent they are implicated by any of the questions, it should be presumed that transaction format changes are out of scope for NU7 due to the widespread desire to avoid wallet-breaking changes in the next network upgrade.

However, the orgs all agree that transaction format changes are in scope for the following network upgrade.

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