Zcash NU7 hours away: ~12,226 ZEC still in Sprout

Zcash’s NU7 network upgrade is due at block 3,543,405, the height developers locked in last month. On Thursday morning the chain sat near 3,542,650, leaving roughly 750 blocks — about 15 to 16 hours at the current 75-second target — before the new rules apply, according to Blockchair and the zkp.baby dashboard.

Zcash is a so-called privacy coin, a blockchain that can encrypt amounts and addresses in shielded pools. A network upgrade changes the consensus rules every node must follow from a set height.

We first covered that height in our 21 Oct NU7 height story. The calendar date was always an estimate; activation still depends on how fast miners find blocks.

ZIP 2003 is the rule that matters for older funds. From NU7 onward it disallows every version 4 transaction. Sprout, Zcash’s original shielded pool from 2016, can only be spent inside that format, so remaining Sprout balances become unspendable even if the private keys still work.

The coins are not burned. ZIP 2003 keeps the Sprout balance inside issued supply and leaves open, in theory, a later path to restore spending — while warning that spending may never return.

As of a dashboard stamp at 18:58 UTC+8 on 5 Nov (10:58 UTC), zkp.baby showed about 12,225.69 ZEC still in Sprout. At the dashboard’s $1,318.40 price that is roughly $16.1 million. CryptoSlate, citing the same dashboard on 17 Oct, had put Sprout near 22,309 ZEC, so a large share has already left the pool in the past three weeks.

Why it matters: retirement of legacy cryptography is becoming a recurring ops story across chains. Ethereum layer 2 Blast shut its network this week and opened a year-long recovery window; Zcash is closing a spend path rather than shutting the chain, but the user deadline is just as hard once the height lands.

What else NU7 changes

NU7 is more than the Sprout cutoff. ZIP 259, the deployment spec, bundles a cut in target block spacing from 75 to 25 seconds and removes 60% of transaction fees from circulation for later reissue, among other changes listed in the NU7 ZIP set.

Node operators need software that understands the new rules before the height. ZIP 259 warns that unsupported software may stay online and keep following pre-NU7 rules, which is why wallet and exchange connections matter as much as the Sprout balance itself.

Sapling, Orchard and transparent balances are not frozen by ZIP 2003. The restriction is the version 4 transaction format; non-Sprout flows can be rebuilt in newer formats where the wallet supports them.

ZEC last traded near $1,318.75 on Kraken around 10:56 UTC, little changed on the day. Next milestone: block 3,543,405 itself — after that, any ZEC still in Sprout stays issued but cannot move under current rules unless a later upgrade restores a path.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.