Zcash holders favor preserving halvings, delaying recycled ZEC to February 2031

Participating Zcash coinholders favored preserving scheduled halvings over replacing them with smoother issuance. The tally was 2,375,932.375 ZEC for preserving halvings and 22,384.875 ZEC for smoother issuance. A separate vote favored February 2031 as the start date for returning ZEC collected by the Network Sustainability Mechanism to future block rewards. That option received 2,319,643.75 ZEC. Starting as soon as possible received 70,239.625 ZEC. February 2027 received 6,283 ZEC. The choices were part of a five-question advisory poll on NU7. Between 2.399 million and 2.404 million ZEC participated in each question. All five questions exceeded 1 million ZEC. The poll rules required only one question to reach that threshold for the overall poll to be considered representative. About 2.33 million ZEC supported disabling Sprout-era v4 transactions at NU7 activation. Nearly 2.4 million ZEC favored reducing target block spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds alongside per-pool action limits. Another 2.38 million ZEC supported shipping NU7 without any applicable feature that misses the Sept. 30 implementation deadline. The advisory poll does not activate changes or schedule NU7. It does not guarantee that every preferred feature will ship. The Zcash Community Advisory Panel received responses from 135 of 198 eligible members. That represented a 68% response rate. A community-authored recap characterized ZCAP as narrowly favoring smoother issuance. The recap characterized other panels collectively as favoring the earliest possible start for recycled issuance. Those signals differ from the ZEC-weighted poll. On Sept. 15, a public post said Shielded Labs, Project Tachyon, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation and Valar Group had aligned on February 2031 as the most conservative interpretation of the outcome. The post said another poll could revisit the timing if conditions change. As of Sept. 17, Zcash's official NU7 page said the activation height had not been set. The preserve-halvings specification work remained open. Relevant deployment values remained unassigned. Implementation will determine which preferences reach mainnet and when.