Zcash’s November 5 Target: Will Waiting Times for Private Payments Shorten?
Zcash is targeting November 5 for its NU7 upgrade, which aims to speed up private payments and restructure miner revenues.
Zcash development teams plan to reduce the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds with the NU7 upgrade. This change could allow exchanges and bridges waiting for a fixed number of confirmations to release ZEC transactions in about one-third of the time.
In private Zcash payments, the sender, recipient, and transaction amount do not appear on public blockchain records. According to developers, shorter block intervals could make such direct payments more practical; however, this does not mean it will offer an experience faster than instant card payments.
Zcash upgrade will also change miner revenues
Under NU7, approximately 60 percent of transaction fees will be temporarily removed from circulation. This mechanism, to be introduced via ZIP-235, stipulates that the set-aside fees will return to miners through block rewards starting from February 2031.
Reducing the block time to one-third will not cause the ZEC supply to triple. The reward given for each block will also be divided by three. Additionally, the halving interval will be extended from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million blocks to largely maintain the profile of total issuance over time.
The content of the upgrade was determined through community and coin-holder votes following discussions by the Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL, and Shielded Labs teams. Approximately 2.4 million ZEC participated in the voting. This amount corresponded to 66 percent of the eligible pool. Maintaining the current halving schedule received 98.9 percent support, while returning fees to miners in 2031 received 96.6 percent support.
The code is scheduled to be completed on September 30, and the upgrade is planned to move to the testnet on October 6. The final decision for the mainnet will be made on October 20. Therefore, November 5 stands out not as a finalized launch date, but as the current target date.