Zcash developers are targeting Nov. 5 to activate NU7, the privacy-focused network's next major upgrade, which will cut block time—the interval between confirmed batches of transactions—from 75 seconds to 25. A companion rule shrinks the reward miners earn per block by roughly the same factor, keeping the total amount of new ZEC created each day unchanged.

The faster block interval is set to be NU7's biggest improvement, a three-times speedup for a coin built around zero-knowledge proofs—math that lets someone prove a payment is valid without revealing who sent it, to whom, or how much. Shorter blocks mean shielded, private transactions confirm almost as fast as a card swipe. For scale, Bitcoin targets a new block roughly every ten minutes, while Ethereum produces one about every twelve seconds.

Developer Sean Bowe said NU7 hits Zcash's testnet on Oct. 6, and the team will set the final mainnet activation height on Oct. 20 after watching how the network behaves under the new rules, according to the NU7 timeline proposal on the Zcash forum. Activation heights—a pre-agreed block number rather than a calendar date—are the standard way proof-of-work networks coordinate upgrades, since every node switches rules at the same point in the chain; picking one on Oct. 20 leaves roughly two weeks of buffer before the Nov. 5 target.

The Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar Group, ZODL, and Shielded Labs—the separate teams and companies that build Zcash's software—reached what developers called unanimous agreement on the upgrade's scope and timeline, with the underlying specifications due by Sept. 30.

Faster blocks create an obvious problem: three times more blocks per day would normally mean three times more new coins minted, unless something offsets it. NU7's fix, a proposal called ZIP 218, divides the reward paid per block by roughly three. Per the spec, this keeps total issuance per unit of wall-clock time exactly where it was.

That matters because Zcash, like Bitcoin, runs on halvings—a built-in rule that cuts the mining reward in half every few years until it eventually approaches zero, capping the total coins that will ever exist. Zcash coinholders were asked to weigh in directly on whether to keep that, and 98.9% of the votes cast backed keeping it, out of 2.4 million ZEC voted by 66% of the eligible pool. Putting a monetary rule to a direct coinholder vote is unusual among proof-of-work networks, where protocol changes more often emerge from developer, miner, and business coordination.

Halvings eventually starve miners of revenue, though—a structural squeeze built into any fixed-supply proof-of-work chain, where fees must ultimately make up what issuance no longer covers. NU7 answers that with a Network Sustainability Mechanism that, starting in 2026, will set aside roughly 60% of transaction fees rather than let them disappear. Those banked fees start flowing back out as supplemental mining rewards in February 2031, a date the five development teams called the most conservative reading of the coinholder vote.

None of this changes what an ordinary ZEC holder does day to day—wallets aren't expected to need major changes, and NU7 doesn't add new transaction types. What it changes is whether Zcash can keep paying miners to secure the network decades from now, without abandoning the fixed-supply promise that drew Bitcoin-style holders to it in the first place.

The timing follows a rough few months for the network, though a remarkable run for its native coin ZEC. In July, Zcash pushed through the Ironwood upgrade to patch a four-year-old flaw that could have let someone mint counterfeit ZEC, a scare that briefly crashed the token 38%.

ZEC has since more than recovered: it is up over 2,500% in the past year, helped by Ironwood's fix and by Grayscale listing a spot ETF—a fund that trades on a regular stock exchange and tracks an asset's price, letting investors get exposure without holding the coin directly.