Josh, Alex, and I will be organizing sentiment polling around NU7 in January to assess community and coinholder sentiment around adding new features to the protocol. Over the past year, the Zcash community has grown significantly, and we want to ensure there is still strong support for these new features. The poll will include Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs), the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), Memo Bundles, and the other proposals listed here:
Given the delays with zcashd deprecation and the fact that the activation timeline for NU7 remains uncertain, we want to allow additional candidates to be considered. Since NU7 was first introduced, several new ideas have also emerged, including quantum resilience, dynamic fees, and L2 designs leveraging TZEs. We want to give these projects an opportunity to submit ZIPs so they can be considered for prioritization alongside the existing candidate ZIPs. Anyone who wishes to propose a ZIP for this polling round should submit it by Friday, January 16 at 11:59pm UTC.
A ZIP is required for inclusion in the poll. While the poll will help inform priorities, a high level of support for a feature does not guarantee its inclusion in NU7, which will depend on technical feasibility and whether the change can be implemented without significantly delaying activation. Also, if the ZIP Editors determine that new candidates cannot be accepted at this stage, we will respect that determination.
Polling will take place in mid-to-late January and will involve coinholders as well as ZCAP, ZAC, ZecHub, and other community panels. I will follow up in the next week or two with a more detailed timeline, including when the registration period for coinholder polling will occur.
Philosophy is to keep the L1 minimal, pure, focused on censorship resistance and decentralisation.
Let L2s handle scale and programmability (thinks ZSAs but on L2s, Defi, perps, stablecoins, etc).
We’d like to clarify the purpose of this poll. Its goal is to gauge sentiment on protocol features that are finished or expected within the next year.
While we initially mentioned NU7, this poll isn’t tied to a specific upgrade. If the community supports smaller changes but lacks consensus on larger ones, we may wait to bundle those small updates into a later, more substantial release.
Network upgrades carry high coordination costs. We believe upgrades should only happen when the changes are meaningful enough to justify the effort. This poll is a tool to help us understand ecosystem priorities and not a commitment to ship specific features on a fixed timeline.
This poll is a tool to help us understand ecosystem priorities and not a commitment to ship specific features on a fixed timeline.
Can you clarify if the poll still requires that questions pertain to existing ZIPs? I was under the impression more open-ended questions would be allowed before this topic was created, and the constraint that ZIPs be required (or, initially, that it would focus on NU7) was not articulated to me previously.
Josh, Alex, and I went back and forth on whether the poll should be open-ended or tied to a specific network upgrade. After considering the trade offs and getting feedback from a couple of ZIP Editors, we decided not to tie the poll to a specific network upgrade, but to require that proposals have a ZIP in order to ensure the poll focuses on features that are completed or near completion, rather than early-stage or theoretical proposals.
What specific question do you want to ask about Tachyon? We can discuss including it.
Message signing is a critical feature for Zcash. This is what enables “Connect Wallet” across DeFi applications like Near Intents. The reason that Zcash users can’t login to websites with their wallets today is that the standard for Orchard message signing has not been defined yet.
I welcome feedback on my attempt at bringing “Connect Wallet” to Zcash in my first ZIP draft, Orchard Address Signatures, which will hopefully bring awareness and help us chart a path towards enabling message signing for Zcash users.
I was asked to share a question here that I would like to see included in the poll. Rather than posing an open-ended question about Tachyon (since no formal proposal has been put forward) I wanted to focus on clarifications that could help guide future development, reduce the risk of misalignment, and avoid wasted effort.
In the interest of avoiding painful overhead in the voting process, and after mulling about different concerns and getting advice from others, I propose the following question:
Do you consider it a priority for the Zcash project to deploy a new shielded protocol or pool specifically aimed at addressing scaling challenges? (Yes/No/Abstain)
Background: The development of a new shielded protocol is a large project, and to make it worthwhile it has to be executed quickly while still meeting the quality and governance standards of the project: getting consensus, quality auditing, testnet activation, ZIP/specification requirements, etc.
As with previous shielded protocols, my plans for Tachyon include adding support for the protocol before broad wallet support is developed, as I intend to engage in those efforts in parallel. This is the kind of speculative execution that we’ve engaged in previously, but there are possibly many other optimizations to the development process and integration strategy that I’ll want to engage in.
In general, it would help a lot for the community to signal a desire to see a project like this to fruition, as it would lessen my concerns about making difficult trade-offs in the interest of shipping faster. I don’t want to turn the poll into a popularity contest, though, so I’ve proposed this limited question to collect a mandate from the community about the general effort.
If we view this polling as a way to empower the community to influence resource allocation then I think this is a good idea. While it could be argued the direction is clear I’m sure we can all appreciate that resource allocation is hard and even slight increases in certainty can make big differences.
Quick update: Today is the final day to submit ZIP proposals. Tomorrow, we’ll open the registration period for the coinholder poll, and then we plan to begin all polling on Wednesday, January 28. I’ll share the list of questions next week.
Hello, I know this last minute. Please consider this ZIP proposal addresses critical synchronization reliability issues that directly impact all Zcash wallet users across the entire ecosystem. As maintainers of Nozy Wallet (which implements a reference version of this standard), we strongly support this ZIP and believe it will significantly improve reliability, user trust, and interoperability across all Zcash wallet implementations.
We wanted to share some information on the upcoming protocol feature sentiment poll and post the draft questions ahead of time for community feedback.
The goal of this poll is to gauge coinholder and community sentiment on a set of proposed protocol features and changes. To ensure transparency, we’re publishing the questions in advance so the community has an opportunity to review them before polling begins.
All polling — including coinholder polling and polling of ZCAP and other engineering and community panels — will begin on January 28 and will run for at least three weeks. This timeline is intended to give participants sufficient time to review the proposals, discuss them, and make informed, thoughtful decisions. If it becomes clear that additional time is needed, the polling period may be extended.
When polling opens, we will publish detailed background materials for each proposal, including links to the relevant ZIPs, forum discussions, and other supporting resources. In the meantime, we’ve linked the primary proposal associated with each question below.
Please let us know if you have any feedback on the draft questions or the polling process by Monday, January 26 at 11:59pm UTC.
Poll Questions
What is your general sentiment toward including Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs) as a protocol feature?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward including the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) as a protocol feature?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward including Memo Bundles, which let transactions include memos larger than 512 bytes and share a memo across multiple recipients, and also permits inclusion of authenticated reply-to addresses, as a protocol feature?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward adding protocol support to enable Explicit Fees, allowing transaction fees to be clearly specified and committed to in the transaction?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward disallowing v4 transactions, which would disable the ability to spend Sprout funds?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward deploying a new shielded protocol or pool to address scalability challenges as part of Project Tachyon?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward adding protocol support for STARK proof verification via Transparent Zcash Extensions (TZEs) to enable Layer-2 designs on Zcash?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward adding protocol support for a comparable-based, dynamic fee mechanism?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward adding protocol support for consensus accounts, which generalize the functionality of the dev fund lockbox and could be used for ZCG funds and miner rewards?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
What is your general sentiment toward adding protocol support for “Orchard quantum resilience”, allowing recovery of Orchard funds if the protocol must be disabled due to the emergence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer?
a. Support
b. Oppose
c. Abstain / Indifferent
more like this maybe:
What is your general sentiment toward the idea to disallow v4 transactions (which would disable the ability to spend Spout funds)?
a. Support removing v4 support
b. Oppose removing v4 support
c. Abstain / Indifferent
