Zcash Developers Target November for Major Private Payment Speed Boost

Zcash developers have set a Nov. 5 target for NU7, a network upgrade designed to reduce block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. The upgrade would also establish a mechanism to reserve about 60% of transaction fees for future miner rewards beginning in February 2031.

NU7 follows discussions among Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL and Shielded Labs. The organizations and their engineering teams reached a unanimous agreement on the proposal after conducting multiple polls among community members and ZEC holders.

Approximately 2.4 million ZEC participated in the voting, representing 66% of the eligible pool. Some 98.9% of the participating ZEC supported keeping the current halving schedule, while 96.6% backed February 2031 for the start of fee distributions to miners.

Faster Block Production

Zcash and other payment-oriented blockchain projects seek to let users transfer money directly between wallets or send funds to merchants without depending on banks or card networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

Users can hold and spend digital assets from their own devices, including for online and international payments, without requiring a financial institution or card issuer to process each transaction.

That model also highlights one of the privacy challenges associated with public blockchains. Transactions from transparent addresses can reveal account balances, previous payments and connections between addresses.

Zcash’s shielded payment system is designed to keep the sender, recipient and transaction amount hidden from public view. Users can therefore make payments without creating a publicly searchable trail of their financial activity.

Blocks bundle transactions together before miners add them to the blockchain. A transaction receives its initial confirmation once it is included in a block.

By cutting the target block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, NU7 could allow exchanges and bridges that require a fixed number of confirmations to release ZEC in roughly one-third of the current time.

The shorter interval would still not match the speed of a card tap at a physical checkout, but Zcash developers expect it to make direct private payments more practical.

Issuance Schedule Adjusted

Producing blocks three times faster will not cause Zcash to issue three times as much ZEC.

NU7 would divide the reward attached to each block by three and extend the halving interval from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million blocks. Together, those changes are intended to leave Zcash’s long-term issuance largely intact.

The upgrade would also bring in the Network Sustainability Mechanism.

ZIP-235 calls for roughly 60% of transaction fees to be temporarily taken out of circulation instead of being paid to miners. Those coins are scheduled to return through block rewards starting in February 2031.

The additional rewards are intended to support miners as Zcash’s normal issuance declines through successive halving cycles.

November Date Remains a Target

NU7 would eliminate the older transaction format without adding a new one. Wallets are not expected to require major modifications, although software used by full nodes, indexers and block explorers may need to be updated.

Developers expect the code to be completed by Sept. 30, with NU7 scheduled to reach Zcash’s testnet on Oct. 6.

The final decision on mainnet activation and the selection of an activation height are planned for Oct. 20. As a result, Nov. 5 is still a target date and not yet a confirmed mainnet launch.