Zodl, the Zcash wallet app formerly known as Zashi, has added shielded ZEC coinholder polling in version 3.5.0, giving ZEC holders a wallet-native way to participate in the upcoming Network Upgrade 7, or NU7, sentiment process. The beta feature, announced by Zodl in a May 28 post on X, is designed to let users vote privately with shielded ZEC held in Zodl or through Keystone-supported wallet flows, without moving funds to separate voting tools.
Zodl Adds Shielded ZEC Voting for NU7 Poll
Zodl framed the release as a governance milestone for the Zcash ecosystem, where coinholder polling has historically required more manual workflows. “Zcash governance is entering a new phase with the first shielded coinholder polling feature built directly into Zodl. ZEC holders can now participate in coinholder votes and polls using shielded ZEC held in the ecosystem’s most trusted wallet, including the funds secured by @KeystoneWallet with votes reviewed and signed on-device,” the Zodl account wrote.
The first beta release was built by Zodl in collaboration with zkDragon’s Valar team and will be used for the upcoming NU7 coinholder poll. In the app, users can open Settings, select “Beta: Coinholder Polling,” review active polls and linked Zcash Improvement Proposals, submit shielded votes, and track open, completed and closed polls. Zodl said votes are private and that users’ funds do not leave their wallet during the process.
Timing is central to eligibility. ZEC holders who want to vote through Zodl Coinholder Polling must have their ZEC inside Zodl or Keystone by June 1 at 11:59 p.m. UTC; funds transferred after that cutoff will not be eligible for the NU7 poll. Polling is scheduled to open June 10 and close June 24 at 8:00 p.m. UTC, with final results expected by June 29.
Zcash Coinholders Get Private Wallet-Based Polling
NU7 polling is not a binding governance vote in the strict legal sense. It is a sentiment process intended to measure support across Zcash constituencies, including ZCAP, coinholders, engineering groups and community panels, as organizers assess whether specific protocol changes have broad consensus. NU7 is planned as Zcash’s ninth major network upgrade and may include consensus-level changes, making it a material protocol event rather than a routine wallet release.
The current polling round is aimed at resolving remaining scope questions for NU7. Items already treated as part of the upgrade include Orchard Quantum Recoverability, explicit fees, NSM fee burning and an extensible transaction format. Items not slated for NU7 include Project Tachyon, which is targeted for a later upgrade, and Zcash Shielded Assets, which did not reach clear community support for inclusion in this upgrade cycle.
The open questions cover NSM issuance smoothing, the timing of fee reissuance, when to disable legacy v4 and Sprout transactions, whether to activate Orchard memo bundles, whether to reduce block target spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, and whether NU7 should ship quickly or wait until all approved features are complete. The political backdrop is significant: earlier NU7 polling showed major splits, including 70.4% ZCAP support for Zcash Shielded Assets while voting coinholders were 98.6% opposed, and 84% ZCAP support for NSM issuance smoothing while coinholders were 83.5% opposed.
The Zodl release is intended to lower friction for direct coinholder participation. “Over the last couple of years, Zcash has moved toward broader community participation in governance and development funding discussions. More recently, conversations around Network Upgrade 7 (NU7) and future funding models highlighted the need for better ways for coinholders to express sentiment and participate in governance,” Zodl wrote in its announcement.
That matters because the NU7 poll is not a broad yes-or-no vote on the upgrade itself. Instead, it asks ZEC holders to weigh in on unresolved design and timing questions, including whether Zcash should preserve Bitcoin-like halvings or move to a smoother issuance curve, when recycled NSM fees should begin reissuance, and whether legacy Sprout-related transaction support should be disabled immediately at NU7 activation or one year after the poll concludes.
The faster-block-time question is among the more technical items. It asks whether Zcash should reduce block target spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds while keeping daily ZEC issuance unchanged. The published trade-off is lower inclusion latency and higher Orchard throughput, weighed against more blocks per day, additional consensus and full-node sync work, reduced Sapling per-block capacity, and a higher projected stale rate.
For Zcash, Zodl’s beta voting feature brings coinholders closer to a process that has often depended on fragmented tooling and constituency-based polling. The final NU7 results will remain advisory, but the addition of private wallet-based voting gives ZEC holders a more direct channel for expressing preferences on the protocol’s next major upgrade. Zodl summarized the change plainly: “Coinholder polling is still a very new process within the Zcash ecosystem, and until now, participating has often meant relying on clunky external workflows and unfamiliar tools that required moving funds around. This Zodl release changes that.”
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.