Olivia Capozzalo & Denis Omelchenko
February 25, 2026

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

In the Zcash community’s recent sentiment poll, the most contentious item was a 2021 proposal that would make it possible to issue fully private tokens on Zcash.

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Today’s Big Story

Zcash Community Split Over ‘Flagship Feature’ That Aims to Bring DeFi to the Ecosystem

The Zcash Foundation has shared the results of its latest NU7 sentiment polling, and it’s pretty clear the community isn’t all on the same page. While some proposed changes got backing, one proposal — which the foundation referred to as a “flagship feature” — has turned into a real point of division.

NU7 isn’t a simple yes-or-no vote. It’s a bundle of sentiment polls on different proposals meant to shape the next network upgrade. The polling pulled input from governance members, coinholders, and other parts of the community.

The most contentious item was Zcash Shielded Assets — or just ZSAs — a proposal back from late 2021 that would create a token standard for issuing fully private tokens on Zcash, similar to ERC20 tokens on Ethereum. The proposal describes its goal as enabling a privacy-focused DeFi ecosystem on Zcash. The feature was developed mainly by teams funded by the Zcash Foundation and Electric Coin, Zcash’s development company, and it’s been framed as a major long-term bet for the whole network.

But in a blog post this week, the foundation said the poll results show “significant disagreement” around ZSAs, noting that governance groups largely backed the idea (over 70%), while coinholders overwhelmingly opposed it (nearly 99%).

Coinholder voting results. Source: forum.zcashcommunity.com

While it’s still not entirely clear what drove such an overwhelming “no” from ZEC holders, there is an on-the-record document that laid out potential risks tied specifically to ZSAs.

In 2024, a legal white paper, commissioned and published by the Zcash Foundation, looked at U.S. regulatory issues around ZSAs, warning that issuers of said tokens could face exposure to money transmitter rules, sanctions compliance, and securities laws.

It’s not clear if or how much that paper played into this recent vote, as even the Zcash Foundation noted in its blog post that they “need to understand why coinholders oppose ZSAs so strongly — whether it’s economic concern, technical risk, complexity, or something else.”

The debate lands amid a tense stretch for Zcash, which has recently dealt with governance disputes, as The Defiant reported earlier. Meanwhile, the price of ZEC has retraced much of the multi-month rally that kicked off last fall and made the asset last year’s best performing large-cap.

Even with all the disagreements, there are still some changes everyone seems to back, per the sentiment poll. Upgrades that make shielded transactions faster got near‑universal support, and improvements that help the network recover funds in case of rare errors were also popular across the board.

The community was also on board with changes to transaction fees, backing both clearer, explicit fees and the idea of burning a portion of those fees too.

Denis, staff reporter at The Defiant

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