Nearly 2.4 million ZEC took part, about two-thirds of the eligible supply, and 98.9 percent chose bitcoin-style halvings over a smoothed issuance curve. The result is advisory: NU7 still needs code, testing and a ZIP activation.
Zcash coinholders have voted to keep the network's bitcoin-style halving schedule and to cut the gap between blocks from 75 seconds to 25, according to results from a ballot that closed on September 14.
CoinDesk reported that nearly 2.4 million ZEC took part, out of roughly 3.6 million eligible, and put support for the shorter block interval at 99.9 percent and support for preserving halvings at 98.9 percent. CryptoBriefing independently gives the same 98.9 percent figure on the halving question. Neither outlet links to a tally published by the organizers, and no official results document was available when this report was published.
The ballot itself is on the Zcash community forum. Five questions ran from August 25 to September 14, weighted by holdings at a snapshot taken at block height 3459350, around 19:00 UTC on August 24. The organizers set a floor of one million ZEC participating in at least one question. Valar Group and Project Tachyon administered the vote, and the Vizor and Zodl wallets supported it.
The question with the longest reach was ZIP 234, which would have replaced Zcash's halvings with a smoothly tapering issuance curve under the Network Sustainability Mechanism. Holders rejected it. Zcash keeps the step function it inherited from bitcoin's design, and its next halving is expected in late 2028.
The block time question, ZIP 218, is the one that changes what miners see. Cutting the interval from 75 seconds to 25 triples the number of blocks the network produces in a day. The proposal keeps the 21 million ZEC supply cap, so on an unchanged emission schedule each of those blocks has to carry roughly a third of the subsidy a block carries now. Total issuance over any given period does not move. What moves is the size and frequency of the payout, which matters more to a solo miner riding block-to-block variance than to a pool distributing shares.
Two further questions passed with similar margins. Holders backed delaying the reissuance of funds removed by the Network Sustainability Mechanism until February 2031, at 96.6 percent, and backed shipping NU7 by its September 30 deadline rather than waiting for every proposed feature, at 99.3 percent. A separate question covered deprecating Sprout, the original shielded pool, by disabling the older transaction type that still reaches it.
The mechanism used to collect the votes is itself unusual. Only ZEC sitting in Ironwood, Zcash's newest shielded pool, could vote. Ballots were encrypted and split into sixteen pieces so that validators could produce a tally without learning who voted or how much any voter held. Counting a holdings-weighted vote without revealing holdings is a harder problem than running the same poll on a transparent ledger, where balances and ballots are both visible anyway. Solana settled a comparable emission question by a straightforward on-chain vote in August.
None of this changes the network yet. The results are advisory. The features holders selected still need to be written, tested and activated through the ZIP process, and the Zcash Community Advisory Panel gave input alongside coinholders rather than being bound by the same numbers. What the vote supplies is a direction for NU7, and a fairly unambiguous one: the holders who turned out want faster blocks and do not want the issuance curve smoothed.
The 3.6 million eligible coins are a subset of Zcash's shielded supply rather than of the whole. CryptoBriefing puts roughly 4.89 million ZEC, about 28.9 percent of circulating supply, in shielded pools overall, and shielded transactions at 59.3 percent of recent activity. Coins held transparently, or parked in the older shielded pools, carried no vote.
Zcash mining has drawn more institutional attention this year. Foundry launched a Zcash pool and block explorer in April after taking close to a third of network hashrate in five weeks, and a US spot ETF arrived in August. None of those miners sees a shorter interval until NU7 ships, and holders voted to hold that upgrade to its September 30 deadline rather than wait for the rest of the feature list.
