Zcash Targets November Upgrade to Make Private Payments 3x Faster

Zcash developers are aiming to activate the NU7 upgrade on Nov. 5, cutting the network’s block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. The proposal would also reserve a portion of transaction fees to help fund mining rewards in the future.

The upgrade timeline follows discussions between Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL and Shielded Labs. The participating organizations and engineering teams unanimously agreed on the contents of NU7 after conducting several community and coinholder polls.

Around 2.4 million ZEC took part in the voting process, representing 66% of the eligible voting pool. About 98.9% of participants supported maintaining Zcash’s current halving schedule, while 96.6% backed February 2031 as the date for beginning the return of accumulated fees to miners.

Projects focused on blockchain payments, including Zcash, aim to allow money to move directly from one wallet to another or from a customer to a merchant without relying on banks or traditional card networks such as Visa and Mastercard. This model allows users to store and spend digital funds directly from their devices, including for online and cross-border payments, without requiring a bank or card issuer to process every transaction.

Privacy and Faster Zcash Payments

Public blockchains can create privacy concerns because transactions made from transparent addresses may reveal balances, transaction histories and connections between addresses.

Zcash’s shielded transactions are designed to conceal the sender, recipient and transaction amount from the public ledger. This allows users to make payments without creating a publicly searchable record that exposes details about their finances.

Blocks are groups of transactions added to a blockchain by miners, and a payment receives its first confirmation once it is included in a block. Reducing Zcash’s target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds would allow exchanges or bridges that require a set number of confirmations to release ZEC roughly three times faster.

The shorter confirmation wait could make direct private payments more practical, although paying with Zcash at a physical checkout would still take longer than tapping a traditional payment card, according to the developers.

Zcash Issuance Remains Largely Unchanged

Increasing the block frequency does not mean the network would create three times as much ZEC. Under the proposal, the reward attached to each block would be reduced by three, while the halving interval would increase from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million.

That structure is intended to keep Zcash’s overall issuance trajectory largely unchanged despite the faster block production.

NU7 would also introduce the Network Sustainability Mechanism.

Under ZIP-235, approximately 60% of transaction fees would temporarily be taken out of circulation instead of being distributed to miners. The accumulated coins would then begin returning through block rewards in February 2031.

The mechanism is designed to supplement miner revenue as Zcash’s regular coin issuance declines through successive halving events.

NU7 Development Timeline

The upgrade would remove support for the older transaction format but would not introduce a new transaction format. Developers do not expect wallets to require major changes, although full nodes, indexers and block explorers may need software updates.

NU7 code is scheduled for completion by Sept. 30, with the upgrade expected to reach Zcash’s testnet on Oct. 6.

Developers are scheduled to make the final mainnet decision and select an activation height on Oct. 20. As a result, Nov. 5 remains a target activation date rather than a confirmed launch date.

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