NU7 Sentiment Polling Results

[minty]

Zcap had no problem renewing the dev fund in 2020 with only 119 eligible to vote and only 88 cast their ballot but that was sufficient because it served their interest but when 8% of the circulating supply votes for something that isnt in their interest they cant stop complaining that its not fair. Zcash orgs needs to stop thinking they own Zcash and dev fund money should be spent on upgrades community wants.

[minty]

Agree here on voting being easier.

[Kenbak]

We put together an on-chain analysis of the Q1 ZSA coin holder vote using CipherScan’s indexed data combined with decrypted ballot amounts from the zcash-vote library.

The full write-up is here: ZSA Coin Vote Audit: On-Chain Analysis

What we did:

• Decrypted all 204 individual ballots using the public seed phrase

• Cross-referenced ballot amounts against on-chain shielding flows (transparent → Orchard)

• Traced fund origins for addresses that shielded before the January 27 snapshot cutoff

Some of the findings:

• 204 ballots cast, totaling 1,235,710 ZEC (~24.5% of the shielded pool at cutoff)

• Top 10 ballots held 46% of total voting weight

• 30 shielding events matched ballot amounts within 1 ZEC

• Several fresh addresses were created in December/January specifically to receive funds from exchanges, shield them, and go to zero balance

• 34 NEAR Intents Bridge shields correlated with ballot amounts, suggesting some cross-chain activity around the vote

• The shielded pool grew ~20% in the weeks before the snapshot

All addresses and transaction IDs are included in the report so anyone can verify independently on CipherScan.

Important caveat: correlation is not proof. Matching a shield amount to a ballot amount is circumstantial, once ZEC enters Orchard, it can’t be tracked. The report is transparent about these limitations.

We’re planning to add a Vote Audit page directly on CipherScan so this kind of analysis is available for all coin holder votes going forward. No ETA on that yet as we have a lot on our plate, but it’s on the roadmap.

Hope this is useful to the community. Happy to answer questions or hear feedback.

[hanh]

@mrkit2u

I’m really curious how the other 92.75% of coins would be voted

It is about 1/4 of the Orchard pool though …

[seernet]

It’s quite stunning to see the response from certain members of the community over the results of the coin holder vote. I would understand if the vote was 55/45, or even 60/40. But it is literally 90/10. You had your chance to put your money where your mouth is. Do ZSA supporters simply not hold any coins? Why is that? If the result was 90/10 in favor of ZSA’s, would they be everywhere talking about forks and how the voting methodology was wrong or something terrible has happened and so on?

Let’s be cool guys. The chance to vote with your funds were there. The community has spoken. Let’s all band together behind ZEC and the things that were broadly supported instead of use this as an opportunity to create even more problems after the recent dev disputes, let’s focus on the core mission that has a mandate, and the next time there’s another vote, I urge all ZSA supporters to simply buy more Zcash so they can cast their votes in and we’ll see what the results show

[pacu]

@hameed

We all should recognize that Zcash is truly pioneering on governance. We’ve had some shocks lately – let’s turn the page and build together. We’re not at the point where we can fight amongst ourselves and take on the world simultaneously

I completely agree.

I want to apologize because I did not get involved in discussing the sentiment poll so I feel with less rights to propose ideas or changes for the next one.

One thing we should do is to poll ZURE. Do you agree? If you do, since @peacemonger has a lot on her plate this might involve some kind of collaboration so it doesn’t fall fully on her shoulders. I’m volunteering myself to help with that if this idea takes off.

Yes, new investors did their part. But ZURE was a fundamental input to get Zcash where it is today. I’m pretty confident that without those voices the Zashi team would have built something completely different. Information is king.

The other thing that could improve the signal strength of the voting corpuses is weighted voting.
Voters have a limited set of voting power and they have to assign it to the different options. This kind of happens with CHV but didn’t with ZCAP and ZEC. In real life you can’t do all at once so voting shouldn’t be done as if you could. As it was said, it was easy as ZCAP or ZEC to vote “yes|no to all” it shouldn’t be that way.

Another thing that needs to be evaluated is how mutually exclusive options are treated. I came across in X is someone who voted against some feature (I don’t remember which) because it “increases protocol complexity” but two paragraphs after that same nym was against deprecating v4 transactions which is actually a
problem in terms of protocol complexity. What happens if a sentiment poll results in this dynamic at a grand scale? How shall it be resolved if the winning options are mutually exclusive? Probably the answer is that mutually exclusive options shouldn’t be include in polls that aren’t binary.

That being said. I’m all in favor of these polls happening. We have a lot of information to elevate our discussions.

[daira]

This post is incorrect; you’ve confused the raw counts with percentages.

[shieldedmark]

Here are the ZEC results with abstention taken into account.

[daira]

@joshs

@minty

This means that ZCAP doesnt even own any zcash…

Or, that those on ZCAP that do own ZEC were in the minority within ZCAP.

Or (I think very likely), that those on ZCAP who hold significant amounts of ZEC were persuaded of the risks of using it in the shielded coin-weighted voting protocol, including this potential attack.

[daira]

Summary with all the results side-by-side, and abstentions shown.

Some observations:

• The polls of individual voters are all roughly in-line with each other and divergent with the coinholder poll. (There are a few odd outliers like the relative unpopularity of Explicit Fees in the Zcash Brasil and Türkiye polls.) I pretty much expected this.
• The polls of individual voters are generally in favour of almost everything, with the STARK verification TZE polling lowest (less than 50% in the Zcash Engineering Caucus poll, but that was the only individual poll in which a feature did not have a simple majority).
• These polls can’t override technical showstoppers. For example, the “comparable-based dynamic fee mechanism” just doesn’t work as currently specified in zcash/zips#1157.
• Question 3 depends on NSM protocol support (included in question 2). However, most of the coins voted in support of question 3 (383 409 ZEC) were not voted in support of question 2 (183 536 ZEC). Also most of the coins voted against question 2 (925 478 ZEC) were not voted against question 3 (94 999 ZEC). It could be that some voters were confused about the dependency, but it’s also possible that this represents (subset-of-)coinholder opposition to the issuance smoothing part of NSM (ZIP 234) rather than the protocol support (ZIP 233). Note that my understanding is that Shielded Labs considers ZIPs 233 and 234 to be a package deal.
• It is interesting that there were no transparent coinholder votes.
• The following have overwhelming support in both individual and coinholder polls (everything else is more complicated):
  • Orchard quantum recoverability;
  • Deploying a new shielded protocol or pool for Project Tachyon;
  • Explicit fees.

[artkor]

I just became curious about who (not a specific person), but what kind type of person is the brave crypto millionaire ZEC, who is not afraid to vote that could cost him dearly, at a time when people who know the protocol inside out are afraid to do so.

By the way, the voting process takes about an hour due to complex calculations. You have to be super involved to vote on most issues.

[Milton]

I think that by blocking ZSAs Zcash is needlessly limiting the amount of freedom it can bring to the world. For me the purpose of Zcash is to give people economic freedom by giving them financial privacy. There will always be other assets than ZEC that people want to transact with, and people need this freedom also when they are using those other assets and when they want to do more complex transactions than simple sends. Even though coinholders have basically vetoed ZSAs, the need still exists. That means the need will have to be fulfilled by another chain or fork. That’s too bad because both currency strength and privacy sets benefit from network effects, so fragmenting privacy chains results in a double whammy.

Some arguments against ZSAs I find lackluster:

Narrative	Retort
No centralized issuer wants to issue a stablecoin ZSA	This feels like a strawman at this point. People just asked for a stablecoin. I have not really seen anyone (other than ECC and QEDIT) specifically ask for a centralized issuer to issue a ZSA. There are decentralized alternatives like bridging DAI or a delta-neutral stablecoin. Proponents of this narrative consistently ignore these decentralized alternatives. And we need to build ZSA before we can expect anyone to build a bridge, because else it would be a bridge to nowhere.
We would compete against 100 other chains	People who say this are counting transparent L1s like Ethereum with privacy apps built on top, and counting enterprise chains built with backdoors and compliance up the wazoo. Privacy must be a fundamental value on the L1, otherwise it can be thrown under the bus (see censorship of Tornado Cash by Ethereum validators). There are really only a few legitimate competitors, like Namada. And even if we accepted that the 100 chains were legitimate competitors, then the “encrypted bitcoin” narrative for Zcash will still be competing with these chains as you can literally have encrypted bitcoin on them.
Lack of adoption of Namada and Penumbra proves that there is no demand for ZSAs.	Come on. There are so many things that need to be there and go right for a new chain to succeed. Saying that it proves there is no demand for ZSA is just intellectually lazy. I don’t think there is certainty in that ZSAs would get adoption, but Zcash is at least in a much stronger position than those other chains to introduce multiple assets, partly due to the network effects mentioned earlier.

I don’t find all arguments against ZSAs lackluster. The argument that we need to prioritize making ZEC usable and getting it out to people and that we have a limited time window to do so resonates with me. But i do think when opponents of ZSAs have spoken on cons of ZSAs that the arguments have generally been very bad.

I’m also worried what this means for Proof of Stake for Zcash. I have seen that several influential people with lots of ZEC have come out against a Proof of Stake switch, and I suspect Crosslink is DoA.

[Siegfried]

We are all still digesting the results. While @ebfull publicly predicted that coinholders would likely vote against ZSAs, few expected the opposition to be as high as ~99%.

In general, coinholders appear to be fairly conservative, opposing the majority of changes to the core protocol. What does this imply for our future? Personally, I cannot imagine our community moving forward with ZSAs against the opposition of nearly 99% of the voting stake.

We must come to terms with an investor base that is more conservative regarding core protocol changes than we previously assumed. However, we must do this without falling into the trap of Bitcoin-style ossification around a broken status quo. Some have called this direction "encrypted Bitcoin”.

But what does that actually mean? Which of Bitcoin’s core values do we want to inherit, and which flaws do we need to overcome? Seemingly, the entire community wants to solve Bitcoin’s issues with privacy, scaling, and the quantum threat. We all support Project Tachyon, even if Zcash already surpasses Bitcoin’s TPS. That is because we want the network to be usable currency, not just an implementation detail for an ETF product.

We also agree on keeping the 21 million supply cap, despite valid arguments for tail emissions.

But this leaves us with difficult questions regarding the NSM (Network Sustainability Mechanism), Crosslink, or a pure PoS approach. Our security budget is, like Bitcoin’s, decreasing exponentially, and transaction fees are currently contributing little to fill the gap. Is Proof of Work (PoW) fundamental to “encrypted Bitcoin”? Is PoW compatible with long-term network security and a hard 21 million cap? We may find out the answer before Bitcoin does, because an attack on us is cheaper and easier to conceal.

About 84% of voting coinholders opposed the NSM in its current form, which would have been a first step in mitigating the security budget issue. Yet, interestingly, more than 80% supported the partial burning of transaction fees if the NSM existed. This suggests that the NSM is not necessarily a deal breaker for their investment.

I feel strongly that we must continue trying to solve this issue, or at least “kick the can down the road” a little longer with partial solutions like the NSM.

Onwards to where we all agree! Let’s find a way to improve the network within these new constraints.

[dismad]

@daira

The following have overwhelming support in both individual and coinholder polls (everything else is more complicated):

• Orchard quantum recoverability;

I think everyone can agree this a huge win for Zcash, and I for one am excited to see it in regards to OQR.

[daira]

@Milton

Even though coinholders have basically vetoed ZSAs, the need still exists.

Coinholders don’t have a veto. Also, due to the deficiencies of both the specific coin-weighted voting protocol that was used and (in my opinion) the limitations of coin-weighted voting in general, the outcome of that poll likely represents the opinions of a small subset of whales. I don’t think it can reasonably be held to reliably represent the opinions of all coinholders.

In particular, note that all of the coin-weighted votes on individual questions are highly polarized, with no outcomes in the range of 16.6% – 80% support. This to me is suggestive of a small number of holders controlling most of the voted coins. Which is entirely consistent with:

@Kenbak

Top 10 ballots held 46% of total voting weight

Note that this is 10 ballots; there is some evidence that at least the two largest ballots were from the same voter.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, if fewer than 10 of the ZCAP voters held 46% of the voting power? We’d never hear the end of how unrepresentative that would be.

I have consistently said that views expressed via coin-weighted voting should hold no more than one-third of influence over protocol decisions, and I stand by that.

[ebfull]

Nobody should feel compelled to participate in the coinholder vote, and the operational security concerns raised about it are legitimate. There’s a very real bias because some coinholders felt incapable of voting.

Just a datapoint: I’m a protocol dev that is paranoid about my security and I voted in it.

I personally felt comfortable because I took extra steps to participate safely and conveniently using my own fork of the voting app that I built early last year, and a process I felt comfortable to isolate it and minimize risk. I’ve been using it for all of these votes. Hopefully, I won’t ever have to do it again. But I would have moved heaven and earth to vote with my ZEC because I value participating in the vote so much.

[zancas]

This is not true. ZCAP was never unanimously in favor of ZSAs. I have been active in ZCAP and extremely clear that I am strongly opposed to ZSAs since at least my “Carrying My Shield..” post.

In fact @emersonian directly replies to my post one year ago in which I call out the significant dangers imposed on ZEC by ZSAs with this argument:

@emersonian

if you are a Bitcoin believer you don’t have to hold much Zcash.

That is to say, ZSAs are a mechanism to reduce demand for ZEC.

ZSAs are an attack surface on our protocol @artkor if they’re not, then please explain to me how that can be the case.

In short… I have been loudly opposed to ZSA support, since at least the attempted injection of an L2 backdoor.

[peacemonger]

Thank you, Pacu.
I can do a ZURE poll next time. Just remind me ~a month in advance, so I can plan better.

[zancas]

You didn’t address my argument.

[zancas]

A potential answer to this question @seernet:

@seernet

Do ZSA supporters simply not hold any coins? Why is that?

Is this:

@emersonian

if you are a Bitcoin believer you don’t have to hold much Zcash.

In other words, the point of ZSAs is to make it so there’s no reason to hold ZEC.

That’s the argument that I find compelling.

I see an attempted takeover that’s roughly the inverse of the one @artkor is asserting (if I understand their position correctly).

To be clear, I’m deeply skeptical of coin-holder voting… I’m also deeply skeptical of ZCAP voting.

I think @seernet has asked the right question, and though I have proposed an answer, it’s just an hypothesis, I can think of other plausible answers.