Zcash Is Running—Devs Want to Make It Faster

Zcash developers are targeting Nov. 5 to switch on NU7, the network’s next major upgrade. The biggest improvement is set to be block time, the gap between each confirmed batch of transactions, drops from 75 seconds to 25.

That’s a three-times speedup for a coin built around zero-knowledge proofs—math that lets someone prove a payment is valid without revealing who sent it, to whom, or how much. Shorter blocks mean shielded, private transactions confirm almost as fast as a card swipe.

Developer Sean Bowe said NU7 hits Zcash’s testnet on Oct. 6, and the team will set the final mainnet activation height on Oct. 20 after watching how the network behaves under the new rules.

The Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar Group, ZODL, and Shielded Labs—the separate teams and companies that build Zcash’s software—reached what developers called unanimous agreement on the upgrade’s scope and timeline, with the underlying specifications due by Sept. 30.

Faster blocks create an obvious problem: three times more blocks per day would normally mean three times more new coins minted, unless something offsets it. NU7’s fix, a proposal called ZIP 218, divides the reward paid per block by roughly three. Per the spec, this keeps total issuance per unit of wall-clock time exactly where it was.

That matters because Zcash, like Bitcoin, runs on halvings—a built-in rule that cuts the mining reward in half every few years until it eventually approaches zero, capping the total coins that will ever exist. Zcash coinholders were asked to weigh in directly on whether to keep that model, and 98.9% of the votes cast backed keeping it, out of 2.4 million ZEC voted by 66% of the eligible pool.

Halvings eventually starve miners of revenue, though. NU7 answers that with a Network Sustainability Mechanism that will set aside roughly 60% of transaction fees rather than let them disappear. Those banked fees start flowing back out as supplemental mining rewards in February 2031, a date the five development teams called the most conservative reading of the coinholder vote.

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None of this changes what an ordinary ZEC holder does day to day—wallets aren’t expected to need major changes, and NU7 doesn’t add new transaction types. What it changes is whether Zcash can keep paying miners to secure the network decades from now, without abandoning the fixed-supply promise that drew Bitcoin-style holders to it in the first place.

The timing follows a rough few months for the network, though a remarkable run for its native coin ZEC.

In July, Zcash pushed through the Ironwood upgrade to patch a four-year-old flaw that could have let someone mint counterfeit ZEC, a scare that briefly crashed the token 38%.

ZEC has since more than recovered: it’s up over 2,500% in the past year, helped by Ironwood’s fix and by Grayscale listing a spot ETF—a fund that trades on a regular stock exchange and tracks an asset’s price, letting investors get exposure without holding the coin directly.