Zcash holders overwhelmingly back faster transactions and bitcoin-style halvings

The latest system was introduced this summer to replace the previous token-holder voting process and give shielded balances much stronger privacy guarantees.

Holders also voted 96.6% to wait until February 2031 before beginning to reissue ZEC collected through the Network Sustainability Mechanism, or NSM.

How this helps Zcash

The planned system removes funds from circulation, including at least 60% of transaction fees, and eventually recycles the ZEC through future block rewards. The mechanism does not change Zcash's maximum supply.

The result keeps the existing halving schedule intact while allowing several years of those recycled fees to accumulate before they begin returning to miners.

Meanwhile, holders also showed little appetite for delaying the broader upgrade. About 99.3% voted to ship NU7 as soon as possible while dropping any feature that is not implemented by a Sept. 30 readiness deadline, rather than waiting for every approved component to be finished.

The 25-second block proposal also fits into a wider effort to make private ZEC payments much faster.

CoinDesk reported in August that new Zcash software had cut proof-generation times on mobile devices from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds in some tests, while separate work around Zakura and Project Tachyon is targeting much higher private-transaction throughput.