The Zcash Daily — Monday, September 14, 2026
The NU7 coinholder poll closes today at 19:00 UTC. The ZCAP poll closes alongside it. Twenty days of voting, five questions on the ballot — smooth issuance vs. halvings, 25-second blocks vs. 75, Sprout pool retirement, reissued coins timeline, and whether to ship NU7 without unfinished features. By tonight we’ll have numbers. What we won’t have is a mechanism that turns those numbers into protocol changes. As daira pointed out weeks ago: no ZIP makes this binding. The interesting part starts tomorrow — when developers, the Foundation, and Valar Group decide what to do with the signal. Worth remembering that the earlier February sentiment poll split hard: ZCAP backed issuance smoothing 84%, while coinholders opposed it 83.5%. If that pattern repeats, we’re looking at a legitimacy puzzle, not a mandate.
While the community was watching the vote clock, Zakura shipped v1.4.0. The headline number — 675% faster proving, on a desktop — is impressive enough. But the thing that actually matters here is quieter: Zakura now hosts the first and only formally verified zk-SNARK prover. Machine-checked Lean proofs of statistical honest-verifier zero-knowledge. That’s not a marketing claim, it’s a mathematical guarantee. In a space where “trust the code” is liturgy, someone actually did the work of making the code trustworthy in the formal sense. CoinDesk covered the speed angle, but the verification story is the one with longer legs.
Dory — described as “a true Zcash patriot” — donated 200 ZEC to Shielded Labs. At current prices that’s roughly $230,000. A single community contributor writing a six-figure check to an independent development org. That says something about where conviction sits in this ecosystem. Meanwhile, the Zcon7 program went live — Cancún, October 27-29, landing on Zcash’s 10th birthday. The format is deliberately less stage, more room: debates, workshops, small-group conversations. No ticket fee, but you cover your own personal travel expenses. Scholarships available for contributors who need support.
ZEC is hovering around $1,110-$1,150 this morning, recovering after Friday’s macro-triggered dip below $1,100. The weekend was quiet on price action. The shielded pool crossed another threshold — 4,958,682 ZEC now shielded, nearly 29.3% of total supply. The number keeps climbing regardless of what happens in governance threads or on exchanges. That steady, undramatic growth might be the most honest signal in the entire ecosystem right now.
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