Zcash opens a shielded coinholder vote on its next network upgrade

@Zcash has opened a shielded coinholder vote on the scope of its next major protocol upgrade, NU7, giving $ZEC holders a direct say in decisions that could reshape the network's technical direction.

A New Kind of Governance Vote

The vote is being coordinated by @ValarGroup and Project Tachyon using a newly developed Tokenholder Voting Chain, replacing Zcash's previous governance mechanism. Holders can participate through compatible wallets, including Vizor, Zashi, and Zkool.

The NU7 coinholder vote opened on August 25, 2026, and runs for approximately eighteen days, covering questions on issuance smoothing, fee reissuance timing, Sprout pool deprecation, and block-time reduction. Specifically, coinholders will decide whether Zcash should replace traditional halvings with a smoother issuance curve under the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), when transaction fee reissuance should begin, whether the legacy Sprout transaction format should be deprecated, whether block times should be reduced from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, and how aggressively the NU7 release schedule should proceed if certain features are not completed before the proposed deadline.

To be eligible, only holders of shielded, spendable $ZEC in the Ironwood pool may take part, determined at mainnet block height 3,459,350. After that snapshot, holdings may be moved freely, and the voting right remains. Voting itself runs until September 14, 2026.

Privacy-First by Design, With a Historic Cryptographic First

The voting infrastructure marks a significant technical milestone. Co-founder and engineer Sean Bowe (@ebfull) describes it as the first production use of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) cryptography in the industry. PIR is a cryptographic protocol that allows a user to retrieve an item from a server without revealing which item is retrieved, a property that is central to keeping voter identities and balances private throughout the process.

The voting system employs homomorphic encryption, which encrypts each choice and the associated $ZEC amounts while votes are being processed. After voting closes, only the aggregate ZEC totals for each response are made available. To further reduce balance-linkability, each vote is split into 16 unlinkable ballots.

The voting infrastructure relies on a distributed election authority consisting of at least 10 validators, with vote tallies recoverable only after approval from two-thirds of the validator set. Results will only be considered legitimate if at least 1,000,000 $ZEC participates in the process.

@ValarGroup's work on PIR sits within a broader engineering push for Zcash. The group is working on private information retrieval techniques that let a wallet fetch its own data from a server without the server learning which entries were requested, addressing a long-standing performance bottleneck in shielded wallet software.

Sources
Zcash Community Forum: NU7 Coinholder Vote
CryptoNews: Zcash Announces 1,000,000 ZEC Coinholder Vote on August 25
CoinDesk: Inside Zcash's New Node Targeting Visa-Scale Privacy