Zcash developer Sean Bowe has proposed activating the NU7 network upgrade at block 3,543,405, a height he said was agreed at a meeting of ZIP editors, the group that approves changes to Zcash’s rules. The pull request, opened on 20 Oct, has two editor approvals but had not been merged at about 09:50 UTC on Wednesday.
Zcash is a so-called privacy coin, a blockchain where transfers can be “shielded”, which means amounts and addresses are encrypted on-chain. A network upgrade changes the rules that every node, the computers that keep a copy of the chain, must follow from a set block.
At the current 75-second block target, the chain needs about 18,000 more blocks to reach that height from 3,525,400, its height at 09:43 UTC according to Blockchair. That is about 15 and a half days, which points to 5 or 6 Nov. CoinDesk, citing a dashboard run by the node-software project Zakura, put it at around 5 Nov.
The headline change is speed. ZIP 218 cuts the time between blocks from 75 to 25 seconds, which it says lowers the wait users see by three times. It also caps how many shielded actions fit in a block, while lifting Orchard, Zcash’s newest shielded pool, from 2.9 to 6.6 transactions per second.
The upgrade also takes 60% of each block’s transaction fees out of circulation, under ZIP 235.
The coins are not burned. They are meant to be paid back out through future block rewards, starting at block 8,939,664, according to the pull request’s update to ZIP 259, the deployment spec. At 25-second blocks, that is a little over four years after activation.
“Height agreed at ZIP editor meeting; final modifications to ZIP statuses and other changes needed alongside merge,” Bowe wrote on the pull request.
Why it matters: Zcash is the second network this month to change its block timing. Solana is switching consensus today, as we described in Solana’s Alpenglow switch today. Faster confirmations matter most to exchanges and cross-chain services that credit deposits after a set number of blocks.
Who has to do something
NU7 makes version 4 transactions invalid, ZIP 259 says. Sprout, Zcash’s original shielded pool from 2016, can only be spent with version 4 transactions, so any coins left there become unspendable at activation.
ZIP 2003, the rule that drops version 4, says this is not a burn. It leaves open, in theory, a later way to recover Sprout funds. Nothing in the NU7 specifications schedules one, so holders who want certainty need to move coins out before the upgrade.
The change also reaches beyond Sprout. ZIP 2003 notes that it affects every workflow that still creates version 4 transactions, which matters for older wallets and exchange systems.
Node operators need software that includes the final height. Until the pull request is merged and node releases ship with it, the block number is a proposal, not a scheduled event. NU7 has run on Zcash’s test network since block 4,465,026, set in a change merged on 30 Sep.
Zcash’s last protocol story on CryptoWatchDesk was Zakura’s post-quantum plan for Zcash, which targets January.
ZEC was trading at $1,268 at about 09:46 UTC, up about 0.9% from the UTC-day open, according to Kraken. The next step is the merge of the activation height into ZIP 259 and node releases that carry it.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.