Zcash sets Nov. 5 target for upgrade that would cut block times to 25 seconds
The NU7 proposal, backed by 98.9% of voting ZEC holders, would also divert at least 60% of transaction fees from circulation until February 2031, when they would be returned to miners as block rewards.
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Zcash developers have settled on Nov. 5 as the target date for NU7, a network upgrade that would cut the blockchain's block interval from 75 seconds to 25 — a change that would make private payments confirm roughly three times faster. The date is not yet locked in: a final mainnet decision and the choice of an activation height are due Oct. 20.
The contents of the upgrade were agreed unanimously by the core engineering groups behind Zcash — the Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL and Shielded Labs — after a series of polls involving the community and coinholders. According to CoinDesk, about 2.4 million ZEC took part in the vote, representing 66% of the eligible supply. Of those, 98.9% supported keeping the network's existing halving schedule and 96.6% backed February 2031 as the date collected fees begin flowing back to miners.
Why faster confirmations matter
Zcash is a privacy-focused payments chain. On public blockchains, spending from a visible address exposes the payer's balance, transaction history and links to other addresses. Shielded Zcash transactions conceal the sender, recipient and amount, so a customer can pay a merchant without leaving a public trail into their finances.
A block is a batch of transactions that miners append to the chain, and a payment earns its first confirmation when it lands in one. Services that wait for a fixed number of confirmations — exchanges and cross-chain bridges, for instance — could release ZEC in about a third of the time under the shorter interval. Developers acknowledge a shop-counter payment would still lag a card tap, but say the reduced wait makes direct private payment more workable.
The tripled block rate does not mean tripled issuance. The proposal divides the reward attached to each block by three and stretches the halving interval from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million, keeping the total supply of new ZEC over time essentially the same.
Under ZIP-235, roughly 60% of transaction fees would be taken out of circulation rather than paid to miners, at least in the short term. Those coins are earmarked to re-enter through block rewards starting in February 2031, supplementing miner income just as regular issuance shrinks with each halving.
On the technical side, NU7 would retire Zcash's older transaction format without introducing a replacement. Wallet developers are not expected to make significant changes, though full nodes, indexers and block explorers may require updates to stay compatible.
The rollout schedule runs: code complete by Sept. 30, deployment to Zcash's test network on Oct. 6, and the mainnet go/no-go call on Oct. 20. Until then, Nov. 5 remains a target rather than a confirmed activation date.
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