Zcash coinholders have voted to preserve the network's scheduled halvings and postpone the return of collected ZEC from the Network Sustainability Mechanism until February 2031, according to an advisory poll on NU7, the protocol's next network upgrade.
Between 2.399 million and 2.404 million ZEC participated across five poll questions. All five surpassed the 1 million ZEC threshold required for the poll to be considered representative.
Monetary Policy Results
On the central monetary question, 2,375,932.375 ZEC supported preserving periodic halvings, compared with 22,384.875 ZEC favoring a smoother issuance curve. On timing, 2,319,643.75 ZEC backed February 2031 as the date to begin recycling Network Sustainability Mechanism funds, while 70,239.625 ZEC preferred starting as soon as possible and 6,283 ZEC selected February 2027.
Additional Changes Supported
The poll also showed strong support for other proposed changes. Approximately 2.33 million ZEC favored disabling Sprout-era v4 transactions at NU7 activation. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC supported reducing target block spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds alongside per-pool action limits. Another 2.38 million ZEC backed shipping NU7 without any feature that misses a September 30 implementation deadline.
Status and Next Steps
The advisory poll provides a signal from participating economic stake but does not activate changes, schedule NU7 activation, or guarantee that all preferred features will ship. As of September 17, Zcash's official NU7 page indicated that the upgrade's activation height had not been set, and preserve-halvings specification work remained open with deployment values unassigned.
Implementation work including specifications, code review, testing, and a final activation decision will determine which preferences reach mainnet and when.
