The headline count does NOT give the full story
By the published headline count, this round looks quite savage. More than half the applications were rejected. By value, it looks completely different: the 17 accepted proposals represented USD 8,389,992, or about 93.1% of all the money requested. The 20 rejected proposals represented only USD 624,391.20.
That difference makes sense once you look at what was funded. Q3 contained a large group of security, remediation and Ironwood-related requests, including bug bounties, formal verification, emergency engineering work and external audit costs. Coinholders overwhelmingly approved much of that work after the fact.
Some of those votes were not even remotely close. They were landslides.
The USD 738,942 Ironwood formal-verification request received 2,177,498.25 ZEC Accept. The USD 750,000 Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability bounty received 2,179,062.50 ZEC Accept. ValarGroup’s USD 1.203 million Ironwood work received 2,174,891.50 ZEC Accept.
Retroactive funding did its job rather well there. Something serious happened, people spent money and did work in response, there was finished output to inspect, and coinholders could decide afterwards whether they thought it was worth paying for.
The lower-amount option DID produce information
At the headline level, our fine new voting option appears to have done nothing. None of the 37 proposals ended with “Would Reconsider in a Future Round at a Lower Amount” as its displayed outcome. Twenty simply show “Reject - Do Not Support the Proposed Project.”
But look underneath the headline result, and the picture changes.
For ZecBooks, 190,131.75 ZEC selected the lower-amount option. That was about 9.7% of all rejection votes. For the Open-Source Zcash Hardware-Wallet SDK, 179,654.63 ZEC selected it, about 9.2%. Blindvault received 176,932.63 ZEC in the same category, about 8.9%.
None came close to having the lower-amount option beat outright rejection. So I would not claim that the wallet I used displayed the wrong result.
But there is still information there.
If nearly one in ten rejecting ZEC is effectively saying “not at this price”, that is different from everybody saying “I don’t support this”. The headline result strips that distinction away unless the applicant opens a voting wallet and studies the underlying tally.
That seems a waste of a useful signal from coinholders. But we can use this experience as an opportunity to improve that aspect for the next binding vote.
The most interesting price signal came from a grant that passed
The clearest example is actually the USD 150,000 Zebra Critical Vulnerability Bug Bounty.
It received 1,392,929.25 ZEC Accept, 4,122 ZEC Do Not Support, 622,261.38 ZEC Reconsider at a Lower Amount, and 159,926.88 ZEC Abstain.
So it still passed comfortably even when the two rejection options are combined. But a very large block of voting power was also saying something specific about price. Around 31% of the non-abstaining vote selected the lower-amount option.
“Accepted” is therefore a correct verdict, but it is an incomplete description of what coinholders said.
The same pattern appears elsewhere, just less dramatically. ZODL received 137,082 ZEC for lower amount despite being accepted. Zec.rocks received 103,761.25 ZEC. The Five Critical Zebra Consensus Divergence Vulnerabilities proposal received 75,624.13 ZEC.
So I don’t think the Q3 experiment shows that the lower-price option failed.
Quite the opposite.
Coinholders used it. The headline result strips that distinction away unless the applicant looks at the underlying wallet tally.
And then there is zcashtocash
The USD 6,000 zcashtocash via Zcash Labs proposal gives us a useful comparison because the funding model had been discussed very explicitly before the vote.
I wrote earlier that I liked the experiment. Zcash Labs put up USD 5,000 itself and asked coinholders for USD 6,000 afterwards, effectively cost plus 20% for its time and financial risk. That fitted my own bias towards retroactive funding and private capital carrying execution risk first.
The Q3 tally was 1,566,863.75 ZEC Accept, only 1,845.50 ZEC Do Not Support, 289.75 ZEC Lower Amount, and 610,683.25 ZEC Abstain.
So whatever people thought about the 20% markup, almost nobody expressed that objection through the lower-price option. Only 289.75 ZEC did.
There was, however, a very large Abstain vote.
Again, that tells us something useful that the single word “Accepted” does not.
Connaugh did actually pass
The initial Q3 results reported Connaugh Zcash Videos as Abstain.
Its tally was 757,044.25 ZEC Accept, 187,236.63 ZEC Do Not Support, 196,044 ZEC Lower Amount, and 1,038,923.25 ZEC Abstain.
@str4d pointed out that ZIP 1016 requires at least 420,000 ZEC to be voted, with a simple majority cast in favour. Excluding Abstain leaves 1,140,324.88 ZEC of non-abstaining voting power, of which 757,044.25 ZEC, about 66.4%, was cast in favour.
FPF agreed and corrected the official result from Abstain to Accept.
So this was not just a question about how the wallet displayed the result. A binding grant result was initially published incorrectly and corrected only after somebody independently checked the tally against the governing ZIP.
That is worth remembering when we think about independent verification of binding coinholder votes.
ZEC participation was up sharply
About 2.18 million ZEC of voting power participated in Q3.
Q1 had 500,607.94 ZEC on every question. The inaugural Q4 2025 round reported more than 1 million ZEC on most questions.
That is more than four times Q1. It is also roughly twice the level seen on most proposals in the inaugural Q4 2025 round, where more than 1 million ZEC participated on most questions.
One thing I nearly got wrong. Across the 37 questions, total voting power varied by only about 2,423 ZEC around the 2.18 million level, a spread of roughly 0.11%. I first read that as holders engaging equally with famous and obscure proposals.
It isn’t evidence of that. In Q1, the wallet presented all questions together and defaulted each one to Abstain, producing exactly the same 500,607.94 ZEC total on all six questions. So near-identical totals can be a feature of the ballot design rather than evidence that voters paid equal attention to every proposal.
What this does not tell us is how many individual coinholders were behind that 2.18 million ZEC of voting power. The totals themselves do not reveal how voting power was distributed, and shielded voting prevents us from identifying voters. We therefore cannot tell from these figures alone whether the result reflects many smaller holders or a small number of very large ones.
That distinction is important.
Q2 applicants were not rejected twice
There is another trap here which I nearly fell into.
Several Q3 applications have low GitHub issue numbers and Forum threads dating from the Q2 period. At first glance it looks as though they were rejected before, came back, and were rejected again.
That is mostly wrong.
The Q2 vote was postponed after disclosure of the Orchard vulnerability because the voting system relied on Orchard notes. Applicants could carry their applications into Q3, revise them or withdraw them.
So applications carried forward from the postponed Q2 round were getting their first CDRGP funding vote in Q3. Zcash Grants Hub, the Hardware-Wallet SDK, Zafu, ZAP1 and ZcashNames should not be described as rejected twice.
This matters, because a supposed repeat rejection with no explanation would be one of the strongest examples of a broken feedback loop. It would also be a bad argument if the first rejection never happened.
Nozy is different
Nozy Wallet really was rejected in an earlier CDRGP round and returned in Q3.
The earlier application asked for USD 21,000. The Q3 application asked for USD 60,000 and covered materially broader work.
It was rejected again, with 521,243.63 ZEC Accept, 1,648,338.63 ZEC Do Not Support, 3,818.13 ZEC Lower Amount and 5,802.25 ZEC Abstain.
They did not simply lower the price and resubmit the same thing. The scope changed and the request increased.
But it still illustrates the feedback problem.
A project can return with substantially more completed work, receive another rejection, and still learn almost nothing from the ballot about why the majority remained opposed.
Was it the wallet architecture? Demand? Quality? Duplication? Price? Something else entirely?
3,818.13 ZEC said lower amount. More than 1.64 million ZEC simply said no.
That is a verdict.
It is not an explanation.
Edit: Updated to reflect that the result for Connaugh’s grant was officially updated from Abstain to Accept.