A new proposal in the Zcash community suggests establishing a dynamic fee market to ensure users are not driven away by excessively high fees.

PANews, December 9—According to CoinDesk, Shielded Labs has introduced a new proposal suggesting the establishment of a dynamic fee market for Zcash to address rising transaction costs and network congestion. The proposal recommends moving away from Zcash’s longstanding static fee model—which originally set fees at 10,000 “zatoshis,” later reduced to 1,000. While this model worked under low demand, it eventually triggered a “sandblasting” spam transaction wave, causing wallet congestion and on-chain transaction bottlenecks. The previous ZIP-317 proposal adopted an operation-based accounting method, which curbed abuse but still kept fees predictable and relatively low, lacking adjustment based on usage.

The latest proposal introduces a simple, stateless dynamic fee design built around “comparables”: it uses the median fee per operation observed over the past 50 blocks as a baseline and adds synthetic transactions to simulate persistent congestion. The median fee will be set as the standard fee, divided into intervals by powers of ten to reduce linkability and prevent user data leaks. Under stress, a temporary priority lane will be enabled, charging 10 times the standard fee, allowing users to compete for block space without redesigning protocols. The system is planned for a phased rollout: initially monitored off-chain, then implemented as a wallet policy, and only after approval, introduced as a simple consensus change with set block height expiration and powers-of-ten fee rules. This approach avoids the complexity and fork risk of mechanisms like EIP-1559 while preserving Zcash’s privacy constraints. Other proposed ideas include using mining difficulty as a long-term heuristic indicator for USD-denominated fees and adjusting prices based on mempool pressure.