Days after the NU7 upgrade cut Zcash's (ZEC) target block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, developers ValarDragon and Evan Forbes want the number to fall again. The pair posted a draft Zcash Improvement Proposal (ZIP) to the Zcash community forum on Sunday, asking that the target block time be reduced to 20 seconds.

If adopted, the change would mark a second consecutive step down in the interval at which the network produces blocks, following NU7's recent reduction. The draft remains at an early stage: ZIPs are typically refined through public discussion on the community forum before any protocol changes are bundled into a network upgrade, so forum feedback and subsequent revisions to the draft are the checkpoints to watch before any concrete timeline emerges.

A familiar trajectory

Shorter blocks are not new territory for Zcash. The 2019 Blossom network upgrade halved the target interval from 150 seconds to 75 seconds, and NU7 has now cut it again, to 25 seconds. The proposal from ValarDragon and Forbes would extend that trajectory to 20 seconds — a pace far below Bitcoin's roughly 10-minute target block time.

Why the block interval matters

The target block interval is a core consensus parameter. Shorter intervals can reduce the wait for a transaction's first confirmation, but they also tend to increase the rate of stale, or orphaned, blocks — blocks that do not end up on the network's main chain — a tradeoff consensus engineers weigh when tuning the figure.

Zcash is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency launched in October 2016 from Bitcoin's codebase, distinguished by its use of zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), which allow shielded transactions to be validated without publicly revealing sender, recipient, or amounts. Details of the draft ZIP, including any timeline or target upgrade, had not been finalized at publication time.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/zcash-zec-developers-propose-20-second-block-time-draft-zip