Zcash developers set early-November activation for upgrade that triples transaction speed

Zcash developers have agreed on an activation block for NU7, a network upgrade expected to go live in early November and cut the blockchain's block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds — a change that drops the wait for three confirmations from nearly four minutes down to roughly 75 seconds, the basis for characterizing the upgrade as tripling effective payment speed.

The upgrade is set to activate at block 3,543,405, expected around November 5, according to the proposal filed by Zcash developer Sean Bowe. The activation height was agreed at a meeting of Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) editors, the working group responsible for approving changes to the network's consensus rules, and has received two of the required approvals. As of Wednesday morning, the height had not yet been formally merged into the official deployment specification, ZIP-259, which still listed the activation point as undecided — a step expected to be finalized before the network-wide rollout. Zakura, one of the node software implementations tracking the upgrade, already lists block 3,543,405 as the planned mainnet activation point on its public dashboard.

Beyond the speed increase, NU7 makes two other significant changes to how Zcash operates. First, it permanently disables Sprout, the privacy protocol Zcash launched with at its 2016 debut and which has since been superseded by newer shielded-transaction technology. Any coins still held in Sprout addresses at the moment of activation become permanently unspendable, meaning holders need to move funds out of Sprout before the upgrade activates or lose access to them.

Second, NU7 changes how transaction fees are handled: starting around February 2031, 60% of fees collected in each block will be removed from circulation entirely rather than paid to miners, in effect a partial fee-burn mechanism layered on top of the existing mining reward structure. The existing schedule for halving block rewards over time remains unchanged by this update.

The upgrade has been running on Zcash's test network since early October, giving node operators and wallet providers roughly a month of testing before mainnet activation. Zcash, among the oldest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies still in active development, has seen renewed developer activity and price momentum in recent months as several altcoins outside Bitcoin and Ethereum have attracted fresh attention, as reported by CoinDesk.