Zcash holders gave near-unanimous backing to faster transactions and preserving the network's bitcoin-style halving schedule in a governance vote that drew roughly two-thirds of the $ZEC eligible to participate.

Almost 2.4 million $ZEC voted on the scope of NU7, Zcash's next major network upgrade, out of roughly 3.6 million $ZEC eligible at the snapshot. The results are weighted by $ZEC rather than the number of individual people voting, with one eligible $ZEC representing one vote.

How the voting worked

Organizers had set 1 million $ZEC as the minimum turnout needed to treat the result as representative of coinholders.

Some 99.9% of participating $ZEC backed cutting the time between blocks to 25 seconds from 75 seconds. Blocks are batches of transactions added to the network, so shorter block times generally mean users see payments confirmed faster.

Another 98.9% voted to keep Zcash’s bitcoin-style halvings. Miners, the computers that help secure the network, are paid partly in newly created $ZEC. A halving cuts that new-coin reward in half at fixed intervals. The alternative would have reduced the amount of new $ZEC more gradually over time instead of making those big scheduled cuts.

The voting system itself is as unusual as the result.

Only $ZEC held in Ironwood, Zcash’s newest private transaction pool, could vote. “Shielded” simply means the blockchain can verify that the coins exist and are being spent correctly without publicly showing the wallet balance or the details of the transaction.

That privacy carried over into the vote. In a normal token vote, a wallet casting 500,000 votes can effectively announce to the world that it controls 500,000 tokens and which side it backed. Zcash’s system let that economic weight count without publishing the holder’s balance or identity alongside the choice.

Ballots were encrypted and split into 16 separate pieces before being counted. Validators could add up the final result without being able to reconstruct which holder cast which vote or how much $ZEC that person controlled.

In other words, holders could use their actual economic stake to vote on Zcash's monetary policy and technical roadmap while keeping the size of that stake hidden.

Read More: Zcash seals $1.7 billion shielded pool as Ironwood upgrade activates

That is a major jump from Zcash's earlier coinholder polling. February's NU7 sentiment poll drew participation equal to just 7.25% of circulating $ZEC and exposed sharp disagreements between coinholders and Zcash's Community Advisory Panel, or ZCAP.