Zcash developers confirm November date for upgrade that triples payment speed

Zcash launched in 2016 with two shielded-transaction designs: Sprout, the original privacy pool, and later Sapling, which replaced it in 2018 and is now the de facto standard. Orchard arrived with the 2022 NU5 upgrade. Block times have held at 75 seconds since genesis. NU7 is the next scheduled network upgrade in that lineage, and developers have now fixed the activation point rather than leaving it open-ended.

Once NU7 activates, blocks land every 25 seconds instead of 75, so exchanges and merchants can shorten the wait before treating a payment as final. Miners face new fee rules that change how transaction fees are calculated and distributed, altering their revenue math. Anyone still holding funds in the old Sprout shielded pool needs to move them before shutdown, since Sprout addresses will no longer be processed afterward.

A privacy coin shipping a speed upgrade while still enforcing a scheduled retirement of an older privacy pool shows two competing instincts at once: make the chain more usable for payments, and force users off a legacy feature on the developers' timetable rather than their own. That trade-off, improved throughput against a mandated migration, is worth watching on any chain that markets itself around user control of funds, since the decision here was made by a developer group, not a market or a vote.

The date to watch is November 5, tied to block 3,543,405, but it is not yet locked: the chosen height still needs to be merged into the formal specification and shipped in node software before miners and full nodes can run it. If that merge and release slip, the activation block moves with it; if it ships on schedule, Sprout shutdown and the new fee rules take effect at that exact block.