Summary

  • Zcash said the NU7 upgrade shortened the target block interval to 25 seconds from 75 seconds, boosting privacy payment confirmation speeds by as much as threefold.
  • The upgrade specification said a cap on privacy transaction capacity per block, along with optimization work, will increase basic privacy-payment throughput to more than six transactions per second from about three.
  • Under the new fee structure, 40% of transaction fees will be paid to miners, while 60% will be removed from circulation and accumulated in a reserve, with the total supply cap of 21 million coins unchanged.

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Zcash, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency, has completed a major network upgrade that sharply increases transaction processing speed.

CoinDesk reported on November 6 that Zcash activated the NU7 upgrade at 2:34 a.m. UTC at block height 3,543,405. The core change shortens the target block interval to 25 seconds from 75 seconds, lifting privacy-payment confirmation speeds by as much as threefold.

The real-world impact is concrete. Merchants can receive a first payment confirmation in about 25 seconds on average. For exchanges that require three confirmations, waiting times fall to about 75 seconds from roughly four minutes.

The upgrade also addressed technical stability. Zebra, the Zcash node software developed by the Zcash Foundation's Zebra team and Project Tachyon, was pretested for a 25-second block environment on 80 computers across 11 regions. During that process, the block orphan rate rose to 3.43% from 1.57% in the 75-second environment, but software optimization reduced the burden by cutting repetitive computations.

A cap was also set on privacy-transaction capacity per block. In a worst-case scenario, the daily download burden drops to 169 megabytes from 271 megabytes. The upgrade specification estimates that throughput for basic privacy payments will more than double to above six transactions per second from about three.

The fee structure is also changing. Forty percent of transaction fees will go to miners, while the remaining 60% will be removed from circulation and accumulated in a separate reserve. That reserve is scheduled to be used as a future source of block rewards starting in February 2031, while Zcash's total supply cap of 21 million coins remains unchanged.

The upgrade also formally ended Sprout, Zcash's first privacy pool introduced in 2016. As a result, about 12,224 ZEC became unusable. Co-founder Sean Bowe has proposed a recovery plan, but no option has been formally approved.

Minseung Kang