Zcash developers proposed cutting the block target from 25 seconds to 20 seconds, three days after the NU7 upgrade.
If the proposal by Dev Ojha and Evan Forbes is approved, the wait for the first transaction confirmation on Zcash could drop from about 25 seconds to 20 seconds. The wait for an exchange transaction requiring three confirmations could also fall from about 75 seconds to 60 seconds.
Blocks are data packages to which transactions are added. Before the NU7 upgrade went live on Friday, Zcash produced a block about every 75 seconds; that interval has since fallen to 25 seconds. Actual confirmation times can vary depending on when miners find blocks.
Shorter confirmation times under consideration for Zcash
The change would not increase Zcash’s daily transaction capacity. To balance more frequent block production, fewer transactions would be included in each block, so the total amount of data wallets need to process would not increase.
More frequent block production could increase wasted mining work, because miners may not learn about blocks found by other miners in time. According to ZecBlock’s tracking data, the orphan block rate was 0.69 percent in the 24 hours after NU7, compared with about 0.66 percent before the upgrade. However, an exact comparison between the two periods is not possible because the monitoring network was expanded from one node to ten before the upgrade. The rate for the entire period since NU7 was measured at 1.29 percent, declining after an initial spike.
Ojha and Forbes tested 20-second blocks with 80 miners across 12 regions. Depending on the software used, between 1.9 percent and 3.3 percent of blocks were rejected by the network. This was below the 4.68 percent rate in an earlier stress test that examined whether 25-second blocks were safe.
The results suggest that Zcash may be able to further shorten confirmation times without a significant increase in wasted mining work. However, simulations do not guarantee similar performance on the live network.
The developers want the proposal to be considered in the next community poll and included in a future NU7.1 upgrade. The proposal has not yet been approved, and no date has been set for it to take effect. The change would also preserve Zcash’s supply schedule and its 21 million ZEC supply cap.
Not investment advice.