Thank you to everyone who participated in the NU7 sentiment polling — ZCAP members, coinholders, the Engineering Caucus, ZecHub, Zcash Brasil, Zcash Español, and Zcash Türkiye. The breadth of participation reflects how seriously this community takes protocol governance, and we don’t take that for granted.
We want to be direct: the results reveal both meaningful consensus and real disagreement. We think it’s important to name both clearly rather than gloss over the gaps. The following is our perspective on the path forward.
Thank you to @daira for drafting the full summary of all polling data.
Where There Is Clear Consensus
The following proposals received strong support across all polling groups, including both ZCAP and coinholders. These represent the clearest mandate from this process:
Project Tachyon — Universal or near-universal support across every group. This is the most unambiguous signal from the entire poll and should be prioritized accordingly.
Orchard Quantum Recoverability — Strong support from both ZCAP (90.5%) and coinholders (94.6%). There is no meaningful opposition to this feature anywhere in the community.
Explicit Fees — Consistent support across groups (83.2% ZCAP, 87.2% coinholders). This is well-understood, low-controversy, and broadly wanted.
NSM: Burning Transaction Fees — Both ZCAP (78%) and coinholders (80.1%) support the fee-burning component specifically. This is an important distinction from NSM as a whole (see below).
These four features represent the core of what NU7 can deliver with genuine community-wide support. We believe they should form the foundation of any NU7 scope.
A Note on the Community Group Polls
The Engineering Caucus, ZecHub, Zcash Brasil, Zcash Español, and Zcash Türkiye each conducted their own polls, with participation rates ranging from 57% to 92% within each of their respective groups. Across these polls, results were broadly aligned with ZCAP — strong support for Tachyon, Quantum Recoverability, Explicit Fees, and fee burning, with more mixed signals on ZSAs, NSM issuance smoothing, and STARK/TZEs. We are grateful to each of these groups (and @aquietinvestor) for organizing their own processes and contributing to the overall picture.
We note that the smaller group polls — particularly Zcash Türkiye (7 participants) and Zcash Español (13 participants) — yield results that are directionally informative rather than statistically robust. They lend support to, rather than independently confirm, the broader ZCAP signal.
Where There Is Significant Disagreement
The following proposals show material divergence between ZCAP and coinholder results. The gap between these results is real, and we think it’s more useful to name it directly than to minimize it.
Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs) — ZCAP support was 70.4%, while coinholders voted 98.6% against. ZSAs represent years of community investment and development work and are considered a flagship feature by many in the ecosystem. That work is real and it matters. At the same time, coinholder opposition of this magnitude cannot be dismissed. Before any decision is made, we need to understand why coinholders oppose ZSAs so strongly — whether it’s economic concern, technical risk, complexity, or something else. We invite ZSA proponents and skeptics alike to engage in good faith conversations in the coming weeks.
Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) — Issuance Smoothing — ZCAP supported NSM at 84%, but coinholders opposed it at 83.5%. Combined with the strong coinholder support for fee burning specifically, this suggests coinholders may support the deflationary element of NSM while rejecting aspects of the mechanism that alter issuance. These components need to be disentangled and evaluated independently before moving forward.
Consensus Accounts — 77.9% ZCAP support, 97.3% coinholder opposition. The low ballot count (55) on the coinholder side warrants the same caveat as Memo Bundles, but the gap is too large to proceed without further deliberation.
Memo Bundles — Supported by 76.8% of ZCAP, but coinholders voted 99.3% against. We note that Memo Bundles had among the lowest coinholder ballot counts (62 ballots), so this result may reflect a more motivated or concentrated subset of voters rather than broad coinholder sentiment. This warrants scrutiny before being treated as definitive, and further deliberation is needed.
Sprout Deprecation (v4 Transactions) — 77.7% ZCAP support, 84.6% coinholder opposition. This is a legacy cleanup item that most developers consider overdue, and ZCAP’s support is clear. The coinholder opposition here is worth understanding — it may reflect concern about disrupting existing users rather than opposition to the technical goal itself. We intend to pursue this conversation further before making a recommendation.
STARK Proof Verification via TZEs — The weakest result in ZCAP (56.8% support, 38.4% oppose), with coinholders opposing at 83.6%. There is no path to including this in NU7 based on current sentiment. Further deliberation on the use case and design would be needed before revisiting.
An Honest Note on the Coinholder Poll
We want to acknowledge something directly: the coinholder poll had 7.25% participation of circulating ZEC, and ballot counts varied significantly across questions — from 210 ballots on Tachyon down to 55 on Consensus Accounts. This participation structure matters for interpretation. A near-unanimous result from 55 ballots is a different signal than a near-unanimous result from 210 ballots.
This does not invalidate the coinholder results. Coinholders have legitimate standing in this process, and the mechanism was auditable and transparent. But it does mean that extreme results on low-participation questions should be understood as the strong views of a subset of participating coinholders, not a definitive verdict from all ZEC holders. ZF is committed to working with relevant parties to improve coinholder participation infrastructure for future polls.
What Comes Next
For the proposals with clear consensus — Tachyon, Quantum Recoverability, Explicit Fees, and Fee Burning — we will work with the relevant parties to assess technical readiness and scope for inclusion in NU7.
For the contested proposals, further deliberation is needed before any recommendations can be made. ZSAs in particular require a dedicated community conversation to understand the basis of coinholder opposition. For NSM, we think the fee-burning and issuance-smoothing components should be evaluated on their own terms given how differently they polled.
On governance: the divergence between ZCAP and coinholder results in this poll is not a failure of the process — it’s the process doing its job by surfacing real disagreement. But it does raise a legitimate question about how to weigh different constituencies when they conflict significantly. This deserves its own deliberation, separate from the immediate NU7 decisions.
We know this isn’t the clean, unified result some were hoping for. But we believe a Zcash built on genuine consensus — even if narrower in scope — is better than one built over unresolved community conflict.
We’re committed to playing our role in getting this right. Thank you for staying engaged.
— Zcash Foundation