Cypherpunk Technologies, a Zcash treasury company listed on Nasdaq under CYPH, has published its recommended positions on five issues in the NU7 vote. The company said its treasury holds 323,394.38 ZEC, about 1.91% of the Zcash network, and that it also controls 4.2 Gsol/s of Equihash hash rate.
Cypherpunk said it will not take part in this round of voting because its holdings are kept with a qualified custodian and the onchain voting mechanism is still relatively new. Instead, it said it is sharing its analysis for community reference.
Cypherpunk wants Zcash to keep the four-year halving cycle
On the issuance smoothing proposal, Cypherpunk recommended preserving the current four-year halving mechanism. It said 83.5% of coinholders opposed smoothing in an earlier vote, and argued that the halving is one of the features the market most strongly associates with Zcash’s positioning as a store of value and “digital gold.” The company added that changing the mechanism would be irreversible and carry heavy symbolic weight.
Fee reissuance should start soon after NU7 activation
On the timing of fee reissuance, Cypherpunk said the process should begin as soon as possible after NU7 goes live. It argued that immediate implementation would build trust more effectively than setting a distant future date. At the same time, the company said it is skeptical that protocol security needs miner subsidies through reissuance.
No Sprout deprecation date in NU7
Cypherpunk also argued against setting a Sprout deprecation date in NU7. It noted that the proposal had already been rejected by 84.6% in a previous vote. As of Aug. 24, the Sprout pool still held about 22,621 ZEC. Freezing user access to those funds, it said, would undermine cryptocurrency’s core censorship-resistance value.
Support for faster block times
On block production speed, Cypherpunk explicitly backed reducing block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Citing testnet data, it said the uncle rate was about 4%, and estimated that the mainnet figure would come in below 2%, lower than roughly 5.4% during Ethereum’s proof-of-work era. The company also said the change would materially reduce variance in time to inclusion.
Ship NU7 on schedule and leave out unfinished features
For the NU7 release plan, Cypherpunk said Zcash should stick to the original timeline and drop features that are not ready. The company said Zcash has gone more than two years without a major protocol upgrade, and argued that waiting indefinitely for every feature to be finished would amount to an open-ended time sink.
Positions based on consultations, open to revision
Cypherpunk said its recommendations were formed through broad consultation with protocol engineers, cryptography experts, and community members. It also said Karl Popper’s falsifiability served as the methodological spirit behind its approach. Publishing the positions publicly, the company said, is meant to expose them to criticism and testing, and it pledged to revise its views if stronger arguments are presented.