Zcash targets November upgrade to make private payments up to three times faster

Zcash developers are targeting Nov. 5 an upgrade that would cut the time between blocks from 75 seconds to 25 to go live. The NU7 upgrade would also begin setting aside part of the network’s transaction fees for future mining rewards.

The timetable follows talks among the core builder teams Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL and Shielded Labs. The groups and engineering teams reached unanimous agreement on the upgrade’s contents after a series of community and coinholder polls.

About 2.4 million ZEC participated in the vote, equal to 66% of the eligible pool. Some 98.9% backed keeping Zcash’s existing halving schedule, while 96.6% chose February 2031 as the starting point for returning collected fees to miners.

Developers of payments-focused projects such as Zcash envision money moving directly from a person’s wallet to a business or another person over a blockchain, rather than through banks or card networks such as Visa and Mastercard. That lets people hold and spend digital money from their own device, including online and across borders, without a bank or card issuer processing each payment.

Public blockchains create a privacy problem. Paying from a visible address can expose its balance, previous transactions and links to other addresses. A shielded Zcash payment hides the sender, recipient and amount from the public record, allowing a customer to pay without handing the merchant or anyone watching the blockchain a searchable trail into their finances.

Blocks are batches of transactions that miners add to a blockchain, and a payment receives its first confirmation when it appears in one. Cutting Zcash’s target block time would let an exchange or bridge that waits for a fixed number of confirmations release ZEC in about one-third the time.

At a shop counter, it would still be slower than tapping a card, but the shorter wait makes a direct private payment more practical, in the view of Zcash’s developers.

Producing three times as many blocks would not create three times as much ZEC, however. The proposal divides the reward paid with each block by three and extends the halving interval from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million, leaving issuance over time largely unchanged.

NU7 would also introduce Zcash’s Network Sustainability Mechanism.

Roughly 60% of transaction fees would be temporarily removed from circulation, rather than paid to miners, under ZIP-235. Those coins are intended to return through block rewards beginning in February 2031, adding to miner income as Zcash’s regular issuance falls through successive halvings.

The upgrade would disable the older transaction format but introduce no new formats. Wallets are not expected to require significant changes, though full nodes, indexers and block explorers may need updates.

Code is due to be completed by Sept. 30 before NU7 reaches Zcash’s test network on Oct. 6. Developers will make the final mainnet decision and choose an activation height on Oct. 20, leaving Nov. 5 as a target rather than a confirmed launch date.

Read More: Zcash holders overwhelmingly back faster transactions and bitcoin-style halvings