WiretechnologyBrief
Zcash Activates NU7 Upgrade as Private Payments Become 3x Faster
Zcash activates NU7 network upgrade, introducing faster transaction confirmations, increased private-payment capacity, and significant changes to the blockchain’s fee structure. The upgrade went live early Friday, November 6, reducing the target time between blocks from 75 seconds to just 25 seconds.
Brief
Zcash has gone live with NU7, which cuts the block target from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. The change took effect early Friday, November 6, at block 3,543,405, around 02:34 UTC. Simple Orchard shielded transfers could rise from about 2.9 to 6.6 per second, and new per-block limits aim to ease wallet scanning. Under heavy load, developers measured 3.43% of blocks discarded, up from 1.57%. Miners now keep 40% of fees, while 60% goes into a reserve expected to begin payouts around February 2031. Sprout, the 2016 privacy pool, no longer accepts legacy version 4 transactions, leaving about 12,224 ZEC unspendable; no recovery fix had been approved at activation.
Why it matters: The upgrade reshapes Zcash's block timing, private transaction capacity and fee split together, which bears on how privacy-focused payments and exchange deposits get handled on the network.
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Terms in this story
- Blockchain
- A shared, ordered record of transactions, grouped into blocks, that independent computers check against the same protocol rules.