Zcash Co-Founder Says Privacy Tool Was Used in Coinholder Vote

Sean Bowe, a Zcash co-founder, said private information retrieval was used in the network’s recent coinholder vote, a privacy method designed to hide what data a user requests from a server.

The vote ran from Aug. 25 to Sept. 14, 2026, and closed at 3 p.m. ET (19:00 UTC) on Sept. 14. Private information retrieval, or PIR, lets someone request relevant blockchain data without revealing which information they seek.

That privacy feature could help shielded wallets check for incoming payments without signaling what they are checking. “The hard problem is, how do you figure out you got paid?” said Dev Ojha, a ZK researcher. Ojha said wallets have historically downloaded transaction history and checked it locally, a method he described as unable to handle the scale under discussion.

Other work spans development and proposals. Project Tachyon is a proposed upgrade that would require community approval. Developers have begun recursive-proof work in Zakura Common, aimed at letting full nodes verify a combined proof rather than check each transaction’s proof individually.

Ojha also described state-reduction work in development. It would keep roughly one month of live state on full nodes while allowing older history to be queried trustlessly. A separate idea for remote procedure call (RPC) providers, which supply blockchain data to wallets, would use one-time tokens for a subscription covering 1,000 requests per month. Ojha presented the payment design as a concept requiring further engineering.

The nearer-term network milestone is NU7, with a mainnet activation target near Thursday, Nov. 5, at block height 3,543,405. The upgrade would shorten target block spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, bringing the expected average wait for a first confirmation down to 25 seconds from 75 seconds. Block rewards would be reduced to one-third of their previous level to keep daily ZEC issuance unchanged. Activation depends on the network reaching the specified height, and no hour has been set.