Zcash Coinholders Back 25-Second Blocks and Keep the Halving

Zcash coinholders closed a three-week vote on 14 September, and the tallies published on Wednesday were lopsided. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC took part, about two-thirds of the roughly 3.6 million eligible at the snapshot. They backed cutting block target spacing from 75 seconds to 25, keeping the bitcoin-style halving schedule, and delaying the reissuance of fees held back by the Network Sustainability Mechanism until February 2031. None of it is live yet. The approved items still have to be written, tested and switched on.

Counting the ballots, and who cast them

The vote ran on Zcash's coinholder voting chain, opening on 25 August and closing on 14 September at 19:00 UTC. Eligibility was fixed at block height 3,459,350, roughly 24 August at 19:00 UTC, and the forum thread setting out the rules required "spendable shielded funds in Ironwood", Zcash's newest shielded pool, at that height. Coins could be moved the moment the snapshot was taken. CoinDesk described the counting: ballots encrypted and split into 16 pieces, so validators could produce a total without reconstructing any individual vote or exposing a balance. No other account read for this piece described the mechanism that way. One eligible ZEC is one vote, so the result is weighted by stake and not by head.

"We consider the results legitimate and representative of coinholders if at least 1,000,000 ZEC participates in at least one question," the published rules said.

Turnout cleared that bar with room to spare, and the contrast with February is sharp. The last NU7 round drew coinholder participation equal to 7.25% of circulating ZEC, and individual questions there were settled on as few as 55 ballots. The Zcash Foundation's own write-up of that round recorded a split between the project's two constituencies: the Zcash Community Advisory Panel backed smoothing ZEC issuance at 84%, while coinholders rejected the idea at 83.5%. CoinDesk noted the same divergence on Wednesday. Put to coinholders alone this time, 98.9% voted to leave the halving where it is.

One question with no reported answer

CoinDesk gives four results. Faster blocks took 99.9%, the halving 98.9%, the February 2031 reissuance date 96.6%, and shipping the upgrade as soon as it is ready 99.3%. PANews carries the first three at identical percentages. The fifth question on the ballot asked when v4 transactions should be switched off, which would retire Sprout, the original shielded pool. Crypto Briefing lists that decision among the outcomes but gives no number, and neither CoinDesk nor PANews reports it at all. The answer stands unpublished, not undecided.

Two readings of what the vote settles

Crypto Briefing calls the exercise a set of sentiment polls and writes that advisory results do not flip a switch. CoinDesk describes a vote that decides the upgrade's scope. Both accounts agree on what follows: implementation, testing, then activation through the ZIP process, the same kind of gate that left an XRP Ledger amendment one validator short of its own threshold. Crypto Briefing attaches ZIP 234 to the issuance question and ZIP 218 to block times, numbers neither of the other two accounts carries. The dates diverge as well. CoinDesk reports a 30 September readiness deadline, while PANews describes 30 September as the earliest NU7 could launch, and a checkpoint is not a launch.

Speed is the point

The case for 25-second blocks is confirmation time on private payments, and proving time is the other half of that problem. CoinDesk reported that newer Zcash software has cut proof generation on mobile devices from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests. Crypto Briefing puts shielded balances at 28.9% of circulating supply, about 4.89 million ZEC, with 59.3% of recent network activity shielded; it is the only account read here carrying those figures. Who holds the 2.4 million ZEC that voted is not public, and the design of the ballot is what keeps it that way. Nothing published says whether a single holder moved a decisive block of coins before the snapshot closed. The Sprout answer is still missing too.