NU7 Coinholder Vote — August 25
The biggest governance moment since Ironwood. Sean Bowe (Valar Group / Project Tachyon) called a coinholder vote starting August 25, snapshot August 24 at 19:00 UTC, closing approximately September 14. Five questions on the ballot:
1. NSM issuance smoothing — smooth emission curve vs. preserve halvings
2. NSM reissuance start date — when the new supply model begins
3. Sprout deprecation timing — sunset the oldest shielded pool
4. Faster block times (ZIP-218) — 75s → 25s (3× throughput)
5. NU7 overall schedule — target activation timeline
Minimum legitimacy threshold: 1,000,000 ZEC. Vizor and ZODL have both confirmed voting support. Poll questions received minor adjustments this week after coordination between Project Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, Shielded Labs, and ZODL. Forum
Zcash Labs Launches
New independent go-to-market organization announced August 12 by Tom Howard (@thowar2). Focus: technical Zcash integrations for businesses and institutions. Their first supported project — ZCASHTOCASH — went live the same week: a peer-to-peer shielded ZEC offramp connecting to Venmo, Revolut, Cash App, Chime, Monzo, and Zelle across 100+ geographies.
Funding model: Zcash Labs fronts costs and seeks retroactive reimbursement from coinholders plus a 20% markup. Different from ZCG — more like venture-style bootstrapping for Zcash ecosystem projects. Forum
Ironwood Migration: 75% Complete
Orchard is down to 772K ZEC — from 3.8M at Ironwood's activation 19 days ago. Ironwood now holds 3.06M ZEC (~$1.5B), making it the largest shielded pool by a wide margin. At ~7,500 ZEC/hour, Orchard could empty within two weeks.
Supply verification now sits at approximately 95%: only the remaining Orchard balance is unauditable. When it fully drains, Zcash supply becomes near-100% verifiable for the first time since the Orchard bug disclosure. CipherScan Ironwood tracker
37 Retroactive Grant Proposals — Record Batch, $9M Requested
The Q3 Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grants Program closed submissions August 14 with 37 proposals totaling $9,014,383 requested — by far the largest cohort since the program launched. The 30-day review period runs through September 16, followed by a coinholder poll September 17–29.
Nine proposals cluster around Ironwood security work: Project Tachyon's formal verification, Taylor Hornby's Orchard bug bounty, two community-nominated "bonus grants" pushing Taylor's total to $1.5M, Valar Group's $1.2M Ironwood engineering claim (ebfull: "legendary... it probably wouldn't be live for at least another month or two" without them), a Zebra CVE bounty, five Zebra consensus-divergence vulnerabilities, and an external audit reimbursement. 37-proposal review thread · Full list